Finding Insights
in Social Media
Through Big Data Mining Technology

As the digital environment makes constant progress, social media has rapidly emerged as a tool for global communication, resulting in a cascade of data, including text messages and videos. It is almost impossible to calculate the vast amount of data. Are these data useful? Can they be used to understand global issues? The answer to these questions is big data mining. This technology detects and analyzes notable issues circulating in social media and transforms them into useful resources.

Data incessantly
created by social media

The entire world is now in a process of constant communication on the Internet and in various environments. This communication generates data that is being stored in data networks of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and many other services. Experts say that no asset is more important than data in this information society, because data can be used to produce a range of added value. For instance, data show who is interested in what area; who frequently searches for which information, and which topic is currently drawing people’s attention. As a result, it is necessary to analyze data with big data mining technology in order to make the data more useful and valuable.

Technology to detect
issues in social media

Social Big data mining refers to technology to analyze various social media outlets such as Twitter, blogs, and online news to understand the issues in which users have interest, and to study their emotional responses. In short, the technology analyzes the social phenomena found in social media.
To understand and analyze complicated data flowing through social media and extract useful knowledge from such data, ETRI began to analyze social media based on language processing technology. Designed to detect and monitor issues based on the big data of social networks, and to conduct predictive analysis, the technology developed by ETRI uses language analysis-based information extraction to detect big data produced by the explosive growth of the social Web.
The technology also monitors trending issues on the social media and helps experts make decisions based on the analysis results. The strong point is that the technology can analyze sentences that express user emotions. Coupled with emotional analysis technology for expressive sentences, the technology can infer general likability and social consensus. It further analyzes people’s feelings by subcategorizing the bipolar elements of positivity and negativity. It can not only analyze positive and negative comments, but also classify 20 different feelings, the largest number currently available in the world. Positive comments are divided into sub-feelings such as “inspired” and “satisfied,” while negative comments include feelings such as “dislike” and “angry.” These subsets of feelings could hint at different countermeasures against a certain issue, thereby improving the accuracy of monitoring.

Various
commercialization
achievements

After developing this technology, as a means of selecting and sorting advertisements, ETRI further developed technology to identify emotional information and intent to make certain comments. The institute later introduced domestic original technology for an online ad agency and also developed customized technology transfer through commercialization. By supporting the commercialization process, ETRI successfully commercialized advertisement technology tailored for Interworks Media. Following the commercialization, the company launched a networking service for over 40 press companies in Korea, including KBS Media, the JoongAng Ilbo, and the Korea Economic Daily.
Completing the technology development for this project, the ETRI research team transferred the original technology to a total of nine companies, including in January 2014 to the established research company Minds Lab, for direct commercialization of development results. ETRI also launched big data analysis services including Minds Insight. To publicize their brands and launch new businesses, a number of companies in various industries and business sectors use the technology to analyze and predict market trends based on the diverse data provided by the technology.
By taking advantage of the various information that can be analyzed with the technology, ETRI has continued its effort at commercialization by establishing strategies for companies and by creating brand publicity and advertisements. ETRI also analyzes big data to facilitate big data marketing and consultancy. This technology is particularly utilized for planning new products and identifying and analyzing consumer demand.