Analyzing South Korea’s Defense Challenges with Defense Innovation 4.0 through LDA and BERT Techniques

This paper explores the influence of South Korea’s defense reform initiative, “Defense Innovation 4.0,” by analyzing media coverage before and after its establishment as a national agenda. We collected articles related to defense from a year prior to a year following the announcement. Utilizing the KeyBERT model, we extracted key terms to guide our application of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling. This approach allowed us to discern the evolving discourse on defense issues, particularly in relation to “Defense Innovation 4.0.” Furthermore, we employed a BERT-based model to assess the content of the “Defense Innovation 4.0” policy against the backdrop of defense discussions pre- and post-announcement. Our findings reveal a notable surge in media attention towards the defense sector, with a significant shift in the thematic focus of private media coverage aligning with the policy’s introduction.