A Methodology for Analyzing Public Opinion about Science and Technology Issues Using Text Analysis

Recently, many users frequently share their opinions on diverse issues using various social media. Therefore, many governments have attempted to establish or improve national policies according to the public opinions captured from the various social media. In this paper, we indicate several limitations of traditional approaches for analyzing public opinions about science and technology and provide an alternative methodology to overcome the limitations. First of all, we distinguish science and technology analysis phase and social issue analysis phase to reflect the fact that public opinion can be formed only when a certain science and technology is applied to a specific social issue. Next, we apply a start list and a stop list successively to acquire clarified and interesting results. Finally, to identify most appropriate documents fitting to a given subject, we develop a new concept of logical filter that consists of not only mere keywords but also a logical relationship among keywords. This study then analyzes the possibilities for the practical use of the proposed methodology thorough its application to discovering core issues and public opinions from 1,700,886 documents comprising SNS, blog, news, and discussion.