Identifying the Relevance of Social Issues to a Target Soyeon Caren Han School of Computing and Information Systems University of Tasmania Sandy bay, Tasmania 7005, Australia Soyeon.Han@utas.edu.au Byeong Ho Kang School of Computing and Information Systems University of Tasmania Sandy bay, Tasmania 7005, Australia Byeong.Kang@utas.edu.au Abstract— Social networking services have received a lot of attention recently so that the discussion of certain issues is becoming more dynamic. Many websites provide a new service that displays the list of the trending social issues. Responding to those issues is very crucial because their impact can be significant to organizations or individuals. In this paper, we focus on proposing the method that identifies the personalized relevance of social issues to targets, such as individuals or organizations. To achieve this aim, we first collected trending issues from Google Trends, micro-blog, and Internet news. Then, we obtained the well-structured document management system as a target domain that contains all activities and document regarding target objects. We applied the Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) to obtain the personalized relevance weight of the social issue to a target. Our experiments prove that we can identify the meaningful relevance of social issues to a target such as an individual user or an organization. Keywords Goole Trends, Social Issues, Social Networks, Twitter, Related Keyword, Trending Topic I. INTRODUCTION Social networking services (SNS) have received a great deal of attention recently [15]. These services enable the users to communicate with others in a new way and reflect the users’ real-life interests [16]. SNSs do not only change the way that people communicate but also increase the speed of sharing information. There are two reasons for the latter. Firstly, unlike other online communication services, SNSs provide push-based information. For example, while the e- mail is like a letter that a person places in somebody else’s mailbox, so that it can be opened when the user wants to, SNS can be likened to the user tapping another person’s shoulder and forcefully placing a message in the latter’s hand. Secondly, SNS messages are broadcast to all the people linked to the sender while e-mails are sent only to the addresses specified by the sender. As the speed of the communication flow has been increased by SNS, a large amount of information exists on the Web; and because humans are social beings and are thus intensely interested in what others are doing, there are those who want to see what information people are looking for. Many web companies have not passed up this opportunity. They develop the new service that displays the list of top trending social issues. For example, Google and Twitter provide the new service of showing the list of trending topics in Google Trends and Twitter Trending Topics, respectively. While Google Trends displays the list of top 10 fastest-rising search terms based on hourly data from Google Search, Twitter Trending topic provides the list of top 10 most discussed topics based on tweets in Twitter [10]. The flow of Twitter is influenced by the “big mouths” like celebrities or special groups. Google Trends, however, is based on the search results so that it is affected by general users. According to the Rech, among the existing trending services, Google Trends provides a highly reliable list of social issues. Google Trends is a good indicator of the evolution of world interests in certain topics of search [13]. Therefore, if you define the social issues as “the events that many people are interested in”, the keywords published by Google Trends should be considered as representing people’s interests. Responding to those social issues is very crucial for both individual users and organizations, since certain trending topics may have a significant impact on them. If they know the relevance of a certain trending issue to themselves, they will be able to see and exploit the opportunities and threats that such a trending topic may present for them. Unfortunately, there is no service that identifies the relevance of those trending issues to people. In this paper, we describe our research on developing a service that identifies the personalized relevance of social issues to targets, such as individuals or organizations. First, in order to obtain the social issues, we collected social issue keywords from Google Trends for a period of 195 days, approximately over 5 months. Each keyword from Google Trends represents a certain social issue. However, there is great ambiguity in defining the exact meaning of a certain social issue by using one term from Google Trends. To reduce the ambiguity, we decided to extract several related keywords. As the top 10 social issues keywords from Google Trends are real-time information so that the related keywords should be collected from the services, which provide real- time information, such as micro-blog or Internet news. In this paper, Twitter and Google News were chosen as the related keywords extractor. In order to calculate the relevance weight of social issues to a target, we applied TFIDF. TFIDF is common in calculating relevance weight. We will show the effectiveness of our method by conducting several types of experiments. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the related work, followed by the methodology of this proposed