Constructive Approach for Extracting Viral Spreading Social Issues from Twitter

Abstract

In recent years, "viral spreading social issues" which are social issues that emerge in public consciousness through the fast spread of information online, have been rapidly increasing. This type issues sometimes yield unexpected side effects, such as product boycott. Therefore, it is important to recognize them as early as possible. Existing researches on social issue extraction have mainly focused on news and newspapers. However, the epicenter of viral spreading social issues is not these media but online public opinion. In this study, we propose a constructive approach-based method, which is inspired by the social issues research approach, called "Constructivism", for early extraction of viral spreading social issues. Our experiments revealed that the proposed method successfully extracted six out of ten viral spreading social issues earlier than the first TV news coverage and the average lead time was 20.5 days to the first national TV news coverage.