Policy agenda proposals from text mining analysis of patents and news articles

The purpose of this study is to explore the trend of blockchain technology through analysis of patents and news articles using text mining, and to suggest the blockchain policy agenda by grasping social interests. For this purpose, 327 blockchain-related patent abstracts in Korea and 5,941 full-text online news articles were collected and preprocessed. 12 patent topics and 19 news topics were extracted with latent dirichlet allocation topic modeling. Analysis of patents showed that topics related to authentication and transaction accounted were largely predominant. Analysis of news articles showed that social interests are mainly concerned with cryptocurrency. Policy agendas were then derived for blockchain development. This study demonstrates the efficient and objective use of an automated technique for the analysis of large text documents. Additionally, specific policy agendas are proposed in this study which can inform future policy-making processes.