텍스트 마이닝을 활용한 언론 기사의 핵심 이슈 및 논조 분석: 국내 이주노동자 문제를 중심으로

The purpose of this study is to identify the main issues related to migrant workers covered in South Korean news articles and analyze the emotional tone in which the media addresses these issues. The study has three specific research objectives. First, it examines the most frequently appearing words in domestic news articles related to migrant workers to identify key keywords. Second, it extracts the main topics covered in news articles related to migrant workers to understand the contentious issues. Lastly, it analyzes the positive and negative tones of news articles on each topic to discern the media’s perspective on these issues.
For this research, 1,025 articles published by 96 media outlets from January 2020 to September 2023 were collected using web crawling techniques. After that, term frequency analysis, and LDA topic modeling were performed using Python coding and dictionary-based sentiment analysis was conducted using text analysis tool LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count)-22. Additionally, to utilize LIWC22, which performs analysis based on English words, a deep learning-based translation software DeepL was also used to translate the Korean articles into English before applying LIWC.
The results revealed that ‘employment’, ‘center’, ‘government’, ‘resident’, and ‘wage’ were among the top keywords related to migrant workers. Topic modeling analysis identified ‘local centers and medical support’, ‘housing conditions and improvements’, ‘seasonal and domestic labor policies’, ‘marriage migrant women and employment systems’, and ‘industrial accidents and discrimination’ as the main issues. Lastly, the sentiment analysis showed that news articles related to ‘local centers and medical support’ were described in the most positive tone, while those classified under the topic of ‘conflicts over marriage migrant women and employment systems’ were described in the most negative tone. This research can contribute to clearly identifying the agendas that our society needs to consider and may also encourage media fairness and balance, contributing to the formation of a balanced public opinion.