WEBOMETRICSINSTITUTE

What is the link and text doing here: A Case Study of Cyworld Minihompies in Korea

Steven Sams and Han Woo Park

Background This study analyses user-generated comments

posted to Korean politicians on SNS Cyworld that contain a URL

The study examines the type of service being linked to through the URL and determines the frequency of services

A developed program captures all comments given to a selected set of politicians within a predefined timeframe

The text component of messages is analyzed using two separate machine-learning mech-anisms

Types of HyperlinksFive social functions that hyperlinks can be said to

perform

1. Information Provision2. Network Strengthening3. Identity Building4. Audience Sharing5. Message Amplification

Ackland et al. (2010)

Online Korean Political Sphere As in other countries, Korean politicians are

increasingly turning to social networks as a means to engage with their electorate

In 2007 Cyworld commanded a penetration rate of one third of the total population of South Korea, and since then all indications are that this proportion has increased.

Sample One hundred and thirty Korean National As-

sembly Members’ Cyworld Minihomies. The date parameters of the study were April

2008 – June 2009 One hundred and fifty three thousand six

hundred and two comments were collected for period chosen for the study.

One thousand two hundred and seventy six comments contained links

Data Collection Method A program was developed that performs HTTP

call to request one page of comments from the politician’s visitor board

The content and date are isolated and held in temporary storage.

The process repeats until the target date pa-rameters have been met.

Data Analysis Method: Links The links are checked to determine the num-

ber of unique URLs and corresponding number of unique domains. These links / domains are then manually categorised into website type, such as portals, media, parties, home-pages of politicians, petition sites, online fan clubs, and NGOs)

Location of service found using network query tool to determine the proportion of domestic and international websites

Data Analysis Method: Text To analyse a large body of text, Natural Lan-

guage Processing (NLP) is one ap-proach to categorisation that can mitigate the problem of obtaining accurate results that is unfeasible to perform manually

A rudimentary Java class was developed that wrapped a small subset of the methods pro-vided in the LingPipe API so that they could be called on the extracted text comments.

The developed Java class enabled two forms of analysis: Sentiment Analysis and Colloca-tion

Sentiment Analysis A polarity analyser was developed that is able

to locate significant word combinations and, using the developed corpus model as a training dataset, determine if the combi-nation is generally positive or negative

An accessible corpus of positive and negative sentiment composed in Korean has yet to be realized.

A sample body of 2000 Korean text state-ments were coded into objective, subject-ive - positive and subjective - negative cat-egories

CollocationCollocation analysis can determine which to-kens are more frequently found together than would normally be expected. Collo-cation can identify proper nouns in this way (such as the names or persons, places, or events) that would be lost if the frequency of each token were analysed in isolation.

Results - Links 153,602 comments were collected for period cho-

sen for the study 1,276 comments contained hyperlinks Total link count was 1,920 as it was common to

have more than one hyperlink contained within an individual posting

762 were unique full URLs and 259 were unique domains

1,849 URLs encountered in the sample were found to belong to services based in Korea and 71 from international service

Performing message amplification and network building were prominent causes of link posting

Table 1: LexiURL Unique / Full hostsSite Do-

mains%

daum.net 13 5.0%

cyworld.com 10 3.9%

naver.com 10 3.9%

tistory.com 6 2.3%

nate.com 5 1.9%

donga.com 4 1.5%

hani.co.kr 4 1.5%

chosun.com 4 1.5%

joins.com 4 1.5%

paran.com 4 1.5%

64 24.5

Based on the top 10 domains (24.5%) by occurrence out of 259

Table 2: LexiURL Unique / Full URLsTLD Do-

mains%

com 126 48.6 %kr 79 30.5 %net 25 9.7 %org 10 3.9 %tv 2 0.8 %ro 2 0.8 %uk 2 0.8 %cn 2 0.8 %tk 2 0.8%gov 2 0.8%info 1 0.4 %my 1 0.4 %to 1 0.4 %ws 1 0.4 %in 1 0.4 %us 1 0.4 %am 1 0.4 %Total 259 100

Table 3: Total links to each domain (Korea)Category Domain IP

Coun-try

WHOIS Country

Comments link-ing to Domain

%

Petition agora.media.-daum.net

Korea Korea 325 17.6

News news.naver.com 150 8.1

SNS cyworld.com 139 7.5

Forum cafe.naver.com 106 5.7

Blog blog.naver.com 72 3.9

Blog blog.daum.net 69 3.7

Blog rokp.tistory.com 61 3.3

NGO bss.or.kr 56 3

Forum cafe.daum.net 51 2.8

Government socialenterprise.go.kr 49 2.7

Total 1078 58.3Based on 1,078 (58.3%) of 1,849 links to Korean services

Table 4: Total links to each domain (Overseas)Category Domain IP Country WHOIS Country Com-

ments linking to Domain

%

Video-sharing youtube.com United States United States 15 21.1

Video-sharing video.google.-com

United States United States 12 16.9

Government ams.usda.gov United States United States 5 7

Social welfare thesixsys-tem.net

United States United States 5 7

News reuters.com United States United States 5 7

Homepage jameswon.awardspace.us

Germany Germany 3 4.2

Advertising danawa.tk Netherlands Netherlands 2 2.8

News news.bbc.co.uk United Kingdom United Kingdom 2 2.8

News ireport.com United States United States 1 1.4

News iht.com United States United States 1 1.4

Total 51 71.8Based on 51 (71.8%) of 71 links to overseas services

Table 5: poster-gender and politician backgroundTypes Count %

Ruling Party Female 172 18.3

Ruling Party Male 306 32.6

Ruling Party Gender – Unknown 84 8.9

Opposition Party Female 96 10.2

Opposition Party Male 161 17.1

Opposition Party Gender – Unknown 120 12.8

Total 939 100

Table 6: Comments categorized by link type from the six groups of gen-der and political affiliation

Category Informa-tion provi-sion

Net-work build-ing

Identity/im-age building

Audi-ence sharing

Message amplifica-tion

Spam

Opposition Female

1 20 0 0 11 9

Opposition Male

3 4 1 1 13 8

Opposition Unknown

0 11 1 0 14 2

Ruling Female

1 6 0 0 29 3

Ruling Male

1 5 0 0 23 7

Ruling Unknown

0 12 0 1 16 3

Total 6 58 2 2 106 32

% 3% 28% 1% 1% 51% 16%

Table 6: Comments categorized by link type from the six groups of gender and political affiliation

Based on 206 comments agreed on by both coders from the initial set of 300

Results - Text May and June 2008 were found to have high numbers of

comments containing links that showed negative senti-ment, and this date corresponds with the period of the candlelight protest

May 2009 also shows large numbers of comments con-taining hyperlinks that indicate negative sentiment, co-inciding with the suicide of ex-president Roh Moo-Hyun

The name of Korean President Lee Myung-bak was found to occur two hundred and twenty nine times

Terms pertaining to the candlelight protests, such as Mad Cow disease, beef, American goods, and candle-light protest occurred frequently

Gini coefficient and a less formal term describing a sim-ilar measurement of wealth occurred frequently

Figure 1. Positive and negative sentiment from comments containing links

Confidence LevelsTo determine the effectiveness of the classifi-cation approach, 10% of training data was removed from the training set and used to evaluate the developed model. This approach allows testing the classification based on known human-classified data. The Average Conditional Probability score pro-vides a basis for determining the ability of the classifier to correctly identify positive and negative sentiment. Based on the training set used, the Average Conditional Probability was found to be 87%.

Limitations Less than 1% of all comments posted to the sample of

politicians and indicates that although previous stud-ies have shown how links can support communication in SNSs, their frequency in the Korean online political environment remains rare

Comments deleted over the period of the study may omit the full extent of negative sentiment towards politicians

The practice of deleting content in Korea has been found to be less constrained by social norms than found in Western SNSs, such as Facebook

Legal mechanisms also exist in Korea to encourage the removal of negative content during election peri-ods

Conclusion Links are almost solely targeted to Korean domestic services,

and the few that do point to overseas sites are usually related in some way to domestic issues in Korea

Males are marginally more likely to comment on Cyworld Minihompies using links than females, and those Minihompies managed by ruling politicians were found to be of greater prominence than those of the opposition parties

Message Amplification and Network Building were found to be the dominant purpose for submitting links within user-generated comments.

Using two forms of machine-based learning algorithms, senti-ment analysis and collocation of significant phrases, revealed primarily negative sentiment towards President Lee and his role in the reintroduction of American beef imports. Is-sues surrounding the suicide of ex-President Roh suggested anger towards those who were seen to be harassing him prior to his death

AcknowledgementResearch for this paper has been supported by the World Class University (WCU) program through the National Research Foundation of Korea, which is funded by the Ministry of Edu-cation, Science and Technology (No. 515-82-06574).

Thank you