항공 산업의 ESG 활동 체계화를 위한 토픽모델링 분석

This study aims to conduct a systematic analysis of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) activities in the aviation industry and elucidate the common ESG elements prioritized by major airlines. Employing text mining techniques, we examined ESG and sustainability reports from 21 major airlines selected from the world’s top 100 carriers. The analytical corpus consisted of 294,308 English texts, systematically categorized into environmental (90,903), social (130,949), and governance (72,456) domains. The methodological framework incorporated Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to extract latent themes. The LDA analysis revealed distinct thematic clusters within each ESG domain. The environmental sphere yielded ‘energy conservation’, ‘carbon emission reduction’, and ‘carbon emission policies’ as predominant topics. The social domain exhibited ‘human resource management’ and ‘customer safety’ as primary themes, while the governance sector demonstrated ‘risk management’, ‘risk management systems’, ‘governance transparency’ and ‘operational efficiency’ as salient features. These empirical findings suggest that the ESG initiatives of the examined airlines are fundamentally structured around carbon emission management in environmental policies, human capital and safety protocols in social dimensions, and risk management frameworks in governance structures. A significant observation is the conspicuous absence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) elements, particularly philanthropic activities, within the social domain. This research contributes to the academic literature in several dimensions: it advances methodological frameworks through the implementation of text mining techniques in ESG research, underscores the imperative for establishing standardized ESG evaluation criteria specific to the aviation sector, and documents the strategic evolution and integration of ESG practices in the airline industry. Furthermore, the study provides actionable implications across environmental (carbon emission management), social (human resource and safety management), and governance (risk management system implementation) dimensions, thereby facilitating the development of comprehensive ESG strategies in the aviation sector.