Perception of Psychopath through Comment Analysis: Focused on Web Crawling and LDA

This study explored the perceptions of psychopath among the general public in South Korea by collecting comments through web crawling. To uncover the hidden structures and automatically extract topics, we utilized Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling. A total of 29,126 comments were collected for the final analysis, and through the preprocessing of unstructured natural language data, 7,519 unique words were identified. The results revealed four distinct topics. Topic 1 was named 'Negative perception and demand for capital punishment' as it primarily contained negative words about psychopaths and calls for the death penalty. Topic 2, which was dominated by words related to judges' rulings, was named 'Expectations and concerns about judicial decisions.' Topic 3 was named 'Demands for personal information disclosure,' consisting mainly of words related to the disclosure of personal and facial information. Topic 4 was named 'Words associated with psychopath,' as it included words frequently mentioned in conjunction with psychopath. This research identified several misconceptions about psychopath. It was observed that the general public tends to view psychopath as a mental illness that could justify a reduced sentence, and they perceive psychopath as irredeemable. Thus, this study contributes to enhancing the understanding of psychopath by capturing the social perception and diversity related to it.