• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.155-170
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• 2018

Predicting a company's financial bankruptcy is traditionally one of the most crucial forecasting problems in business analytics. In previous studies, prediction models have been proposed by applying or combining statistical and machine learning-based techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel intelligent prediction model based on the simulated annealing which is one of the well-known optimization techniques. The simulated annealing is known to have comparable optimization performance to the genetic algorithms. Nevertheless, since there has been little research on the prediction and classification of business decision-making problems using the simulated annealing, it is meaningful to confirm the usefulness of the proposed model in business analytics. In this study, we use the combined model of simulated annealing and machine learning to select the input features of the bankruptcy prediction model. Typical types of combining optimization and machine learning techniques are feature selection, feature weighting, and instance selection. This study proposes a combining model for feature selection, which has been studied the most. In order to confirm the superiority of the proposed model in this study, we apply the real-world financial data of the Korean companies and analyze the results. The results show that the predictive accuracy of the proposed model is better than that of the naïve model. Notably, the performance is significantly improved as compared with the traditional decision tree, random forests, artificial neural network, SVM, and logistic regression analysis.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.12D no.3 s.99
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• pp.417-428
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• 2005

Today, IT organizations perform projects with vision related to marketing and financial profit. The objective of realizing the vision is to improve the project performing ability in terms of QCD. Organizations have made a lot of efforts to achieve this objective through process improvement. Large companies such as IBM, Ford, and GE have made over $80\%$ of success through business process re-engineering using information technology instead of business improvement effect by computers. It is important to collect, analyze and manage the data on performed projects to achieve the objective, but quantitative measurement is difficult as software is invisible and the effect and efficiency caused by process change are not visibly identified. Therefore, it is not easy to extract the strategy of improvement. This paper measures and analyzes the project performance, focusing on organizations' external effectiveness and internal efficiency (Qualify, Delivery, Cycle time, and Waste). Based on the measured project performance scores, an OT (Opportunity Tree) model was designed for optimizing the project performance. The process of design is as follows. First, meta data are derived from projects and analyzed by quantitative GQM(Goal-Question-Metric) questionnaire. Then, the project performance model is designed with the data obtained from the quantitative GQM questionnaire and organization's performance score for each area is calculated. The value is revised by integrating the measured scores by area vision weights from all stakeholders (CEO, middle-class managers, developer, investor, and custom). Through this, routes for improvement are presented and an optimized improvement method is suggested. Existing methods to improve software process have been highly effective in division of processes' but somewhat unsatisfactory in structural function to develop and systemically manage strategies by applying the processes to Projects. The proposed OT model provides a solution to this problem. The OT model is useful to provide an optimal improvement method in line with organization's goals and can reduce risks which may occur in the course of improving process if it is applied with proposed methods. In addition, satisfaction about the improvement strategy can be improved by obtaining input about vision weight from all stakeholders through the qualitative questionnaire and by reflecting it to the calculation. The OT is also useful to optimize the expansion of market and financial performance by controlling the ability of Quality, Delivery, Cycle time, and Waste.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.169-184
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• 2016

Deferred tax assets (liability) in a company's financial statements are to reflect the temporary difference between taxable income and accounting income and therefore can provide useful information as a proxy for discretionary accruals. In addition, deferred tax assets allow a company to manage its earnings by reviewing the feasibility of the assets' recognition. As such, this study focused on deferred tax assets to examine their relationship with discretionary accruals, which were measured by a modified Jones model (Dechow et al. 1995), and investigated the impact of audit quality on this relationship. In order to control for the effects of tax rate change and measurement credibility, deferred tax assets of 2,670 non-financial firms from 2009 to 2010 were collected as samples for the study. The results of the empirical analysis are as follows. First, the samples as a whole indicated that deferred tax assets have a negative relationship with discretionary accruals in a general sense, but a high-quality audit did not reveal a significant relationship between them. Second, the 1,379 samples with negative discretionary accruals did not reveal a significant relationship between deferred tax assets and discretionary accruals; however, the result showed a significant negative relationship under a high-quality audit. These findings suggest that in the case of negative discretionary accruals, a high-quality audit restricts an earnings management technique that utilizes deferred tax assets and that the assets can be a useful tool for detecting discretionary accruals. The present study is meaningful in that, unlike previous research, it combined the two contrasting roles of deferred tax assets-that of an earnings management detector and an earnings management tool-to examine their general relationship. The study also suggested that audit quality could influence the usefulness of deferred tax assets in providing information on discretionary accruals.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.139-153
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• 2017

Corporate bankruptcy can cause great losses not only to stakeholders but also to many related sectors in society. Through the economic crises, bankruptcy have increased and bankruptcy prediction models have become more and more important. Therefore, corporate bankruptcy has been regarded as one of the major topics of research in business management. Also, many studies in the industry are in progress and important. Previous studies attempted to utilize various methodologies to improve the bankruptcy prediction accuracy and to resolve the overfitting problem, such as Multivariate Discriminant Analysis (MDA), Generalized Linear Model (GLM). These methods are based on statistics. Recently, researchers have used machine learning methodologies such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Furthermore, fuzzy theory and genetic algorithms were used. Because of this change, many of bankruptcy models are developed. Also, performance has been improved. In general, the company's financial and accounting information will change over time. Likewise, the market situation also changes, so there are many difficulties in predicting bankruptcy only with information at a certain point in time. However, even though traditional research has problems that don't take into account the time effect, dynamic model has not been studied much. When we ignore the time effect, we get the biased results. So the static model may not be suitable for predicting bankruptcy. Thus, using the dynamic model, there is a possibility that bankruptcy prediction model is improved. In this paper, we propose RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) which is one of the deep learning methodologies. The RNN learns time series data and the performance is known to be good. Prior to experiment, we selected non-financial firms listed on the KOSPI, KOSDAQ and KONEX markets from 2010 to 2016 for the estimation of the bankruptcy prediction model and the comparison of forecasting performance. In order to prevent a mistake of predicting bankruptcy by using the financial information already reflected in the deterioration of the financial condition of the company, the financial information was collected with a lag of two years, and the default period was defined from January to December of the year. Then we defined the bankruptcy. The bankruptcy we defined is the abolition of the listing due to sluggish earnings. We confirmed abolition of the list at KIND that is corporate stock information website. Then we selected variables at previous papers. The first set of variables are Z-score variables. These variables have become traditional variables in predicting bankruptcy. The second set of variables are dynamic variable set. Finally we selected 240 normal companies and 226 bankrupt companies at the first variable set. Likewise, we selected 229 normal companies and 226 bankrupt companies at the second variable set. We created a model that reflects dynamic changes in time-series financial data and by comparing the suggested model with the analysis of existing bankruptcy predictive models, we found that the suggested model could help to improve the accuracy of bankruptcy predictions. We used financial data in KIS Value (Financial database) and selected Multivariate Discriminant Analysis (MDA), Generalized Linear Model called logistic regression (GLM), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model as benchmark. The result of the experiment proved that RNN's performance was better than comparative model. The accuracy of RNN was high in both sets of variables and the Area Under the Curve (AUC) value was also high. Also when we saw the hit-ratio table, the ratio of RNNs that predicted a poor company to be bankrupt was higher than that of other comparative models. However the limitation of this paper is that an overfitting problem occurs during RNN learning. But we expect to be able to solve the overfitting problem by selecting more learning data and appropriate variables. From these result, it is expected that this research will contribute to the development of a bankruptcy prediction by proposing a new dynamic model.

• Korean Security Journal
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• no.30
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• pp.85-115
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• 2012

The private security industry has expanded in proportion to economic developments throughout the world, largely because the existing security services provided by the government do not satisfy demands of various economic entities and people in the society for better security service. Therefore, it would not be unfair to say that security services by private sectors are decided by its quality, price, and customers' needs. A refined management system, however, is essential to assess qualification of security companies and their service quality, given the nature of public goods of security service. Despite the steady growth of private security industry in Korea, however, it has been continuously criticized that its security management system for better qualification of security guards, training, and private security companies have not been fully updated enough to guarantee good quality. This paper aims to gain insights to effective policy formation in the Korean private security industry, through reviewing the licensing system of private security guards and the Approved Contractor Scheme (hereinafter the ACS) in the UK- that has on one hand systematically regulated private security industry, but on other hand has enforced public-private cooperation by laying significant stress on autonomy of private security companies. The distinctive characteristic of the UK policy for the private security is that the Security Industry Authority (hereinafter the SIA), an independent authority, is leading development of the private security industry of the UK through specialized private security regulation and enhanced service quality. In addition, the UK is developing quality of security service with transparent financial management and recruitment of good quality security guards by adopting not only substantially specified regulations and standards, but the voluntary ACS system. Moreover, the SIA analyzes customers' demands for security service specializing the policy for private security through conducting a variety of surveys. With the analysis of the UK private security system, this paper suggests that the Korean government change from a non-specialized private security regulation system by the National Police Agency to an independently specialized private security authority like the SIA and adopt the compulsory licensing and the ACS system of the UK.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.59-77
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• 2012

This study focuses on predicting which firms will increase capital by issuing new stocks in the near future. Many stakeholders, including banks, credit rating agencies and investors, performs a variety of analyses for firms' growth, profitability, stability, activity, productivity, etc., and regularly report the firms' financial analysis indices. In the paper, we develop predictive models for rights issues using these financial analysis indices and data mining techniques. This study approaches to building the predictive models from the perspective of two different analyses. The first is the analysis period. We divide the analysis period into before and after the IMF financial crisis, and examine whether there is the difference between the two periods. The second is the prediction time. In order to predict when firms increase capital by issuing new stocks, the prediction time is categorized as one year, two years and three years later. Therefore Total six prediction models are developed and analyzed. In this paper, we employ the decision tree technique to build the prediction models for rights issues. The decision tree is the most widely used prediction method which builds decision trees to label or categorize cases into a set of known classes. In contrast to neural networks, logistic regression and SVM, decision tree techniques are well suited for high-dimensional applications and have strong explanation capabilities. There are well-known decision tree induction algorithms such as CHAID, CART, QUEST, C5.0, etc. Among them, we use C5.0 algorithm which is the most recently developed algorithm and yields performance better than other algorithms. We obtained data for the rights issue and financial analysis from TS2000 of Korea Listed Companies Association. A record of financial analysis data is consisted of 89 variables which include 9 growth indices, 30 profitability indices, 23 stability indices, 6 activity indices and 8 productivity indices. For the model building and test, we used 10,925 financial analysis data of total 658 listed firms. PASW Modeler 13 was used to build C5.0 decision trees for the six prediction models. Total 84 variables among financial analysis data are selected as the input variables of each model, and the rights issue status (issued or not issued) is defined as the output variable. To develop prediction models using C5.0 node (Node Options: Output type = Rule set, Use boosting = false, Cross-validate = false, Mode = Simple, Favor = Generality), we used 60% of data for model building and 40% of data for model test. The results of experimental analysis show that the prediction accuracies of data after the IMF financial crisis (59.04% to 60.43%) are about 10 percent higher than ones before IMF financial crisis (68.78% to 71.41%). These results indicate that since the IMF financial crisis, the reliability of financial analysis indices has increased and the firm intention of rights issue has been more obvious. The experiment results also show that the stability-related indices have a major impact on conducting rights issue in the case of short-term prediction. On the other hand, the long-term prediction of conducting rights issue is affected by financial analysis indices on profitability, stability, activity and productivity. All the prediction models include the industry code as one of significant variables. This means that companies in different types of industries show their different types of patterns for rights issue. We conclude that it is desirable for stakeholders to take into account stability-related indices and more various financial analysis indices for short-term prediction and long-term prediction, respectively. The current study has several limitations. First, we need to compare the differences in accuracy by using different data mining techniques such as neural networks, logistic regression and SVM. Second, we are required to develop and to evaluate new prediction models including variables which research in the theory of capital structure has mentioned about the relevance to rights issue.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.1-33
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• 2019

The small and medium sized enterprises (hereinafter SMEs) are already at a competitive disadvantaged when compared to large companies with more abundant resources. Manufacturing SMEs not only need a lot of information needed for new product development for sustainable growth and survival, but also seek networking to overcome the limitations of resources, but they are faced with limitations due to their size limitations. In a new era in which connectivity increases the complexity and uncertainty of the business environment, SMEs are increasingly urged to find information and solve networking problems. In order to solve these problems, the government funded research institutes plays an important role and duty to solve the information asymmetry problem of SMEs. The purpose of this study is to identify the differentiating characteristics of SMEs that utilize the public information support infrastructure provided by SMEs to enhance the innovation capacity of SMEs, and how they contribute to corporate performance. We argue that we need an infrastructure for providing information support to SMEs as part of this effort to strengthen of the role of government funded institutions; in this study, we specifically identify the target of such a policy and furthermore empirically demonstrate the effects of such policy-based efforts. Our goal is to help establish the strategies for building the information supporting infrastructure. To achieve this purpose, we first classified the characteristics of SMEs that have been found to utilize the information supporting infrastructure provided by government funded institutions. This allows us to verify whether selection bias appears in the analyzed group, which helps us clarify the interpretative limits of our study results. Next, we performed mediator and moderator effect analysis for multiple variables to analyze the process through which the use of information supporting infrastructure led to an improvement in external networking capabilities and resulted in enhancing product competitiveness. This analysis helps identify the key factors we should focus on when offering indirect support to SMEs through the information supporting infrastructure, which in turn helps us more efficiently manage research related to SME supporting policies implemented by government funded institutions. The results of this study showed the following. First, SMEs that used the information supporting infrastructure were found to have a significant difference in size in comparison to domestic R&D SMEs, but on the other hand, there was no significant difference in the cluster analysis that considered various variables. Based on these findings, we confirmed that SMEs that use the information supporting infrastructure are superior in size, and had a relatively higher distribution of companies that transact to a greater degree with large companies, when compared to the SMEs composing the general group of SMEs. Also, we found that companies that already receive support from the information infrastructure have a high concentration of companies that need collaboration with government funded institution. Secondly, among the SMEs that use the information supporting infrastructure, we found that increasing external networking capabilities contributed to enhancing product competitiveness, and while this was no the effect of direct assistance, we also found that indirect contributions were made by increasing the open marketing capabilities: in other words, this was the result of an indirect-only mediator effect. Also, the number of times the company received additional support in this process through mentoring related to information utilization was found to have a mediated moderator effect on improving external networking capabilities and in turn strengthening product competitiveness. The results of this study provide several insights that will help establish policies. KISTI's information support infrastructure may lead to the conclusion that marketing is already well underway, but it intentionally supports groups that enable to achieve good performance. As a result, the government should provide clear priorities whether to support the companies in the underdevelopment or to aid better performance. Through our research, we have identified how public information infrastructure contributes to product competitiveness. Here, we can draw some policy implications. First, the public information support infrastructure should have the capability to enhance the ability to interact with or to find the expert that provides required information. Second, if the utilization of public information support (online) infrastructure is effective, it is not necessary to continuously provide informational mentoring, which is a parallel offline support. Rather, offline support such as mentoring should be used as an appropriate device for abnormal symptom monitoring. Third, it is required that SMEs should improve their ability to utilize, because the effect of enhancing networking capacity through public information support infrastructure and enhancing product competitiveness through such infrastructure appears in most types of companies rather than in specific SMEs.

• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.48 no.6
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• pp.542-557
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• 2015

Purpose: The aim of this study is to develop an evaluation tool for operation of food safety and nutrition education projects for middle class elderly using the concept of the balanced score card. Methods: After the draft of the evaluation tool for the elderly training projects was completed, it was revised into the questionnaire and the validity of the indicators was tested by the Delphi group. The validity of the indicators was rated using a 5-point scale. The Delphi group consisted of 26 experts in the education sector, 16 government officials, and 24 professionals of the related area in communities. The first round test was conducted from July 9 to July 17, 2012, and 45 persons responded. The second round test was conducted from July 18 to July 25 and 32 persons responded. Results: The indicators, which were answered by more than 75 percent of the experts as 'agree' (4 points), 'strongly agree' (5 point) were included as the final indicators for the evaluation tool: 28 items out of 36 in outcome perspectives, 9 items out of 12 in process perspectives, and 17 out of 20 items in structure perspectives. The score was allocated as 50 points for outcome indicators, 20 points for process indicators, and 30 points for structure indicators. Conclusion: Completion of the evaluation tool is a prerequisite to determine whether the program is effectively implemented. The monitoring tool developed in the study could be applied for identification of the most optimal delivery path for the food safety and nutrition education program, for the spread of the food safety and nutrition education program for middle class elderly.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.107-122
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• 2017

Volatility in the stock market returns is a measure of investment risk. It plays a central role in portfolio optimization, asset pricing and risk management as well as most theoretical financial models. Engle(1982) presented a pioneering paper on the stock market volatility that explains the time-variant characteristics embedded in the stock market return volatility. His model, Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (ARCH), was generalized by Bollerslev(1986) as GARCH models. Empirical studies have shown that GARCH models describes well the fat-tailed return distributions and volatility clustering phenomenon appearing in stock prices. The parameters of the GARCH models are generally estimated by the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) based on the standard normal density. But, since 1987 Black Monday, the stock market prices have become very complex and shown a lot of noisy terms. Recent studies start to apply artificial intelligent approach in estimating the GARCH parameters as a substitute for the MLE. The paper presents SVR-based GARCH process and compares with MLE-based GARCH process to estimate the parameters of GARCH models which are known to well forecast stock market volatility. Kernel functions used in SVR estimation process are linear, polynomial and radial. We analyzed the suggested models with KOSPI 200 Index. This index is constituted by 200 blue chip stocks listed in the Korea Exchange. We sampled KOSPI 200 daily closing values from 2010 to 2015. Sample observations are 1487 days. We used 1187 days to train the suggested GARCH models and the remaining 300 days were used as testing data. First, symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models are estimated by MLE. We forecasted KOSPI 200 Index return volatility and the statistical metric MSE shows better results for the asymmetric GARCH models such as E-GARCH or GJR-GARCH. This is consistent with the documented non-normal return distribution characteristics with fat-tail and leptokurtosis. Compared with MLE estimation process, SVR-based GARCH models outperform the MLE methodology in KOSPI 200 Index return volatility forecasting. Polynomial kernel function shows exceptionally lower forecasting accuracy. We suggested Intelligent Volatility Trading System (IVTS) that utilizes the forecasted volatility results. IVTS entry rules are as follows. If forecasted tomorrow volatility will increase then buy volatility today. If forecasted tomorrow volatility will decrease then sell volatility today. If forecasted volatility direction does not change we hold the existing buy or sell positions. IVTS is assumed to buy and sell historical volatility values. This is somewhat unreal because we cannot trade historical volatility values themselves. But our simulation results are meaningful since the Korea Exchange introduced volatility futures contract that traders can trade since November 2014. The trading systems with SVR-based GARCH models show higher returns than MLE-based GARCH in the testing period. And trading profitable percentages of MLE-based GARCH IVTS models range from 47.5% to 50.0%, trading profitable percentages of SVR-based GARCH IVTS models range from 51.8% to 59.7%. MLE-based symmetric S-GARCH shows +150.2% return and SVR-based symmetric S-GARCH shows +526.4% return. MLE-based asymmetric E-GARCH shows -72% return and SVR-based asymmetric E-GARCH shows +245.6% return. MLE-based asymmetric GJR-GARCH shows -98.7% return and SVR-based asymmetric GJR-GARCH shows +126.3% return. Linear kernel function shows higher trading returns than radial kernel function. Best performance of SVR-based IVTS is +526.4% and that of MLE-based IVTS is +150.2%. SVR-based GARCH IVTS shows higher trading frequency. This study has some limitations. Our models are solely based on SVR. Other artificial intelligence models are needed to search for better performance. We do not consider costs incurred in the trading process including brokerage commissions and slippage costs. IVTS trading performance is unreal since we use historical volatility values as trading objects. The exact forecasting of stock market volatility is essential in the real trading as well as asset pricing models. Further studies on other machine learning-based GARCH models can give better information for the stock market investors.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.287-316
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• 2023

As global energy crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have emerged as social issues, there is a growing demand for companies to move away from profit-centric business models and embrace sustainable management that balances environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors. ESG activities of companies vary across industries, and industry-specific weights are applied in ESG evaluations. Therefore, it is important to develop strategic management approaches that reflect the characteristics of each industry and the importance of each ESG factor. Additionally, with the stance of strengthened focus on ESG disclosures, specific guidelines are needed to identify and report on sustainable management activities of domestic companies. To understand corporate sustainability strategies, analyzing ESG reports and news articles by industry can help identify strategic characteristics in specific industries. However, each company has its own unique strategies and report structures, making it difficult to grasp detailed trends or action items. In our study, we analyzed ESG reports (2019-2021) and news articles (2019-2022) of six companies in the 'Finance,' 'Manufacturing,' and 'IT' sectors to examine the sustainability strategies of leading domestic ESG companies. Text mining techniques such as keyword frequency analysis and topic modeling were applied to identify industry-specific, ESG element-specific management strategies and issues. The analysis revealed that in the 'Finance' sector, customer-centric management strategies and efforts to promote an inclusive culture within and outside the company were prominent. Strategies addressing climate change, such as carbon neutrality and expanding green finance, were also emphasized. In the 'Manufacturing' sector, the focus was on creating sustainable communities through occupational health and safety issues, sustainable supply chain management, low-carbon technology development, and eco-friendly investments to achieve carbon neutrality. In the 'IT' sector, there was a tendency to focus on technological innovation and digital responsibility to enhance social value through technology. Furthermore, the key issues identified in the ESG factors were as follows: under the 'Environmental' element, issues such as greenhouse gas and carbon emission management, industry-specific eco-friendly activities, and green partnerships were identified. Under the 'Social' element, key issues included social contribution activities through stakeholder engagement, supporting the growth and coexistence of members and partner companies, and enhancing customer value through stable service provision. Under the 'Governance' element, key issues were identified as strengthening board independence through the appointment of outside directors, risk management and communication for sustainable growth, and establishing transparent governance structures. The exploration of the relationship between ESG disclosures in reports and ESG issues in news articles revealed that the sustainability strategies disclosed in reports were aligned with the issues related to ESG disclosed in news articles. However, there was a tendency to strengthen ESG activities for prevention and improvement after negative media coverage that could have a negative impact on corporate image. Additionally, environmental issues were mentioned more frequently in news articles compared to ESG reports, with environmental-related keywords being emphasized in the 'Finance' sector in the reports. Thus, ESG reports and news articles shared some similarities in content due to the sharing of information sources. However, the impact of media coverage influenced the emphasis on specific sustainability strategies, and the extent of mentioning environmental issues varied across documents. Based on our study, the following contributions were derived. From a practical perspective, companies need to consider their characteristics and establish sustainability strategies that align with their capabilities and situations. From an academic perspective, unlike previous studies on ESG strategies, we present a subdivided methodology through analysis considering the industry-specific characteristics of companies.