Similar Word Replacement Method for Improving News Commenter Analysis

In Korea, it is common to read and comment on news stories on portal sites. To influence public opinion, some people write comments repeatedly, some of which are similar to those posted by others. This has become a serious social issue. In our previous research, we collected approxi-mately 2.68 million news comments posted in April 2017. We classified the political stance of each author using a deep learning model (seq2seq), and evaluated how many similar comments each user wrote, as well as how similar each comment was to those posted by other people, using the Jaccard similarity coefficient. However, as our previous model used Jaccard’s similarity only, the meaning of the comments was not considered. To solve this problem, we propose similar word replacement (SWR) using word2vec and a method to analyze the similarity between user comments and classify the political stance of each user. In this study, we showed that when our model used SWR rather than Jaccard’s similarity, its ability to detect similarity between comments increased 3.2 times, and the accuracy of political stance classification improved by 6%.