Action Proposal as Discovery of Context

A rare opinion may be more meaningful than ones supported by the majority of people. Such an opinion breaks into a popular concept if people become aware of the opinion and admire it as highly acceptable, and the prevalent support grows to be an established consensus. This paper is dedicated to aid in finding the seed of this process, i.e., an opinion with the latent popularity. The structure of the co-occurrence (occurrence in the response by the same subject) between opinions is shown to the key to identifying such an opinion. KeyGraph, a text indexing method, is applied to an accumulated questionnaire-result data for visualizing such a structure. The experiment show the mixture, of the human imagination and the output of KeyGraph, clarify the significance of opinions for forthcoming consensus.

Authors and Affiliations

1. TOREST, Japan Science and Technology Corporation and GSSM, Tsukuba University, 3-29-1 Otsuka, 112-0012, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan

   Yukio Ohsawa

2. Osaka Kyoiku University, 4-698-1 Asahigaoka, 582-8582, Kashiwara, Osaka, Japan

   Yumiko Nara

Editors and Affiliations

1. Graduate School of Business Science, The University of Tsukuba, Tokyo

   Takao Terano  & Yukio Ohsawa  & 

2. School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo

   Toyoaki Nishida

3. Dept.of Computer Science, National Defense Academy, Japan

   Akira Namatame

4. School of Medicines, Shimane Medical University, Japan

   Syusaku Tsumoto

5. The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University, Osaka

   Takashi Washio

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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