Hong, Jungha & Kim, Muncho. 2018. How do Changes in Word Frequencies over
Time in Newspaper Corpora Reflect Social Concerns? Language Information 27. 05-29.
In the aspect of big data research, LG Economic Research Institute & Media Daum
(2010) presents Korean society's concerns in 2010 (August 2009 - July 2010) based
on the ranking of news articles and search terms and market statistics. This is based
on data which would reflect Korean social popularity. The purpose of this paper is
to examine how changes in word frequencies over time in newspaper corpora reflect
social concerns analyzed by LG Economic Research Institute & Media Daum (2010).
We investigate frequency trend charts of words related to social concerns from the
Trend 21 corpus composed of Chosun Ilbo, Dong-A Ilbo, Joongang Ilbo, and Hankyoreh
newspaper articles for 14 years from 2000 to 2013. This paper shows advantages of
using newspaper corpora in linguistics, humanities and social sciences, and big data
research, and suggests the importance of observing changes in word frequencies over
time for exploring social concerns and trends.
Key words: changes in word frequencies over time, newspaper corpora, big data,
social concerns, culturomics, trend analysis, Trend 21 corpus