• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.143-174
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• 2023

With the development of deep learning technologies, Artificial Intelligence powered Optical Character Recognition (AI-OCR) has evolved to read multiple languages from various forms of images accurately. For the financial industry, where a large number of diverse documents are processed through manpower, the potential for using AI-OCR is great. In this study, we present a configuration and a design of an AI-OCR modality for use in the financial industry and discuss the platform construction with application cases. Since the use of financial domain data is prohibited under the Personal Information Protection Act, we developed a deep learning-based data generation approach and used it to train the AI-OCR models. The AI-OCR models are trained for image preprocessing, text recognition, and language processing and are configured as a microservice architected platform to process a broad variety of documents. We have demonstrated the AI-OCR platform by applying it to financial domain tasks of document sorting, document verification, and typing assistance The demonstrations confirm the increasing work efficiency and conveniences.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.77-110
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• 2017

Recently, the diversification and individualization of consumption patterns through the web and mobile devices based on the Internet have been rapid. As this happens, the efficient operation of the offline store, which is a traditional distribution channel, has become more important. In order to raise both the sales and profits of stores, stores need to supply and sell the most attractive products to consumers in a timely manner. However, there is a lack of research on which SKUs, out of many products, can increase sales probability and reduce inventory costs. In particular, if a company sells products through multiple in-store stores across multiple locations, it would be helpful to increase sales and profitability of stores if SKUs appealing to customers are recommended. In this study, the recommender system (recommender system such as collaborative filtering and hybrid filtering), which has been used for personalization recommendation, is suggested by SKU recommendation method of a store unit of a distribution company that handles a homogeneous brand through a plurality of sales stores by country and region. We calculated the similarity of each store by using the purchase data of each store's handling items, filtering the collaboration according to the sales history of each store by each SKU, and finally recommending the individual SKU to the store. In addition, the store is classified into four clusters through PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and cluster analysis (Clustering) using the store profile data. The recommendation system is implemented by the hybrid filtering method that applies the collaborative filtering in each cluster and measured the performance of both methods based on actual sales data. Most of the existing recommendation systems have been studied by recommending items such as movies and music to the users. In practice, industrial applications have also become popular. In the meantime, there has been little research on recommending SKUs for each store by applying these recommendation systems, which have been mainly dealt with in the field of personalization services, to the store units of distributors handling similar brands. If the recommendation method of the existing recommendation methodology was 'the individual field', this study expanded the scope of the store beyond the individual domain through a plurality of sales stores by country and region and dealt with the store unit of the distribution company handling the same brand SKU while suggesting a recommendation method. In addition, if the existing recommendation system is limited to online, it is recommended to apply the data mining technique to develop an algorithm suitable for expanding to the store area rather than expanding the utilization range offline and analyzing based on the existing individual. The significance of the results of this study is that the personalization recommendation algorithm is applied to a plurality of sales outlets handling the same brand. A meaningful result is derived and a concrete methodology that can be constructed and used as a system for actual companies is proposed. It is also meaningful that this is the first attempt to expand the research area of the academic field related to the existing recommendation system, which was focused on the personalization domain, to a sales store of a company handling the same brand. From 05 to 03 in 2014, the number of stores' sales volume of the top 100 SKUs are limited to 52 SKUs by collaborative filtering and the hybrid filtering method SKU recommended. We compared the performance of the two recommendation methods by totaling the sales results. The reason for comparing the two recommendation methods is that the recommendation method of this study is defined as the reference model in which offline collaborative filtering is applied to demonstrate higher performance than the existing recommendation method. The results of this model are compared with the Hybrid filtering method, which is a model that reflects the characteristics of the offline store view. The proposed method showed a higher performance than the existing recommendation method. The proposed method was proved by using actual sales data of large Korean apparel companies. In this study, we propose a method to extend the recommendation system of the individual level to the group level and to efficiently approach it. In addition to the theoretical framework, which is of great value.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.1-23
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• 2013

To discover significant social issues such as unemployment, economy crisis, social welfare etc. that are urgent issues to be solved in a modern society, in the existing approach, researchers usually collect opinions from professional experts and scholars through either online or offline surveys. However, such a method does not seem to be effective from time to time. As usual, due to the problem of expense, a large number of survey replies are seldom gathered. In some cases, it is also hard to find out professional persons dealing with specific social issues. Thus, the sample set is often small and may have some bias. Furthermore, regarding a social issue, several experts may make totally different conclusions because each expert has his subjective point of view and different background. In this case, it is considerably hard to figure out what current social issues are and which social issues are really important. To surmount the shortcomings of the current approach, in this paper, we develop a prototype system that semi-automatically detects social issue keywords representing social issues and problems from about 1.3 million news articles issued by about 10 major domestic presses in Korea from June 2009 until July 2012. Our proposed system consists of (1) collecting and extracting texts from the collected news articles, (2) identifying only news articles related to social issues, (3) analyzing the lexical items of Korean sentences, (4) finding a set of topics regarding social keywords over time based on probabilistic topic modeling, (5) matching relevant paragraphs to a given topic, and (6) visualizing social keywords for easy understanding. In particular, we propose a novel matching algorithm relying on generative models. The goal of our proposed matching algorithm is to best match paragraphs to each topic. Technically, using a topic model such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we can obtain a set of topics, each of which has relevant terms and their probability values. In our problem, given a set of text documents (e.g., news articles), LDA shows a set of topic clusters, and then each topic cluster is labeled by human annotators, where each topic label stands for a social keyword. For example, suppose there is a topic (e.g., Topic1 = {(unemployment, 0.4), (layoff, 0.3), (business, 0.3)}) and then a human annotator labels "Unemployment Problem" on Topic1. In this example, it is non-trivial to understand what happened to the unemployment problem in our society. In other words, taking a look at only social keywords, we have no idea of the detailed events occurring in our society. To tackle this matter, we develop the matching algorithm that computes the probability value of a paragraph given a topic, relying on (i) topic terms and (ii) their probability values. For instance, given a set of text documents, we segment each text document to paragraphs. In the meantime, using LDA, we can extract a set of topics from the text documents. Based on our matching process, each paragraph is assigned to a topic, indicating that the paragraph best matches the topic. Finally, each topic has several best matched paragraphs. Furthermore, assuming there are a topic (e.g., Unemployment Problem) and the best matched paragraph (e.g., Up to 300 workers lost their jobs in XXX company at Seoul). In this case, we can grasp the detailed information of the social keyword such as "300 workers", "unemployment", "XXX company", and "Seoul". In addition, our system visualizes social keywords over time. Therefore, through our matching process and keyword visualization, most researchers will be able to detect social issues easily and quickly. Through this prototype system, we have detected various social issues appearing in our society and also showed effectiveness of our proposed methods according to our experimental results. Note that you can also use our proof-of-concept system in http://dslab.snu.ac.kr/demo.html.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.17-35
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• 2015

Demand forecasting is the activity of estimating the quantity of a product or service that consumers will purchase for a certain period of time. Developing precise forecasting models are considered important since corporates can make strategic decisions on new markets based on future demand estimated by the models. Many studies have developed market growth curve models, such as Bass, Logistic, Gompertz models, which estimate future demand when a market is in its early stage. Among the models, Bass model, which explains the demand from two types of adopters, innovators and imitators, has been widely used in forecasting. Such models require sufficient demand observations to ensure qualified results. In the beginning of a new market, however, observations are not sufficient for the models to precisely estimate the market's future demand. For this reason, as an alternative, demands guessed from those of most adjacent markets are often used as references in such cases. Reference markets can be those whose products are developed with the same categorical technologies. A market's demand may be expected to have the similar pattern with that of a reference market in case the adoption pattern of a product in the market is determined mainly by the technology related to the product. However, such processes may not always ensure pleasing results because the similarity between markets depends on intuition and/or experience. There are two major drawbacks that human experts cannot effectively handle in this approach. One is the abundance of candidate reference markets to consider, and the other is the difficulty in calculating the similarity between markets. First, there can be too many markets to consider in selecting reference markets. Mostly, markets in the same category in an industrial hierarchy can be reference markets because they are usually based on the similar technologies. However, markets can be classified into different categories even if they are based on the same generic technologies. Therefore, markets in other categories also need to be considered as potential candidates. Next, even domain experts cannot consistently calculate the similarity between markets with their own qualitative standards. The inconsistency implies missing adjacent reference markets, which may lead to the imprecise estimation of future demand. Even though there are no missing reference markets, the new market's parameters can be hardly estimated from the reference markets without quantitative standards. For this reason, this study proposes a case-based expert system that helps experts overcome the drawbacks in discovering referential markets. First, this study proposes the use of Euclidean distance measure to calculate the similarity between markets. Based on their similarities, markets are grouped into clusters. Then, missing markets with the characteristics of the cluster are searched for. Potential candidate reference markets are extracted and recommended to users. After the iteration of these steps, definite reference markets are determined according to the user's selection among those candidates. Then, finally, the new market's parameters are estimated from the reference markets. For this procedure, two techniques are used in the model. One is clustering data mining technique, and the other content-based filtering of recommender systems. The proposed system implemented with those techniques can determine the most adjacent markets based on whether a user accepts candidate markets. Experiments were conducted to validate the usefulness of the system with five ICT experts involved. In the experiments, the experts were given the list of 16 ICT markets whose parameters to be estimated. For each of the markets, the experts estimated its parameters of growth curve models with intuition at first, and then with the system. The comparison of the experiments results show that the estimated parameters are closer when they use the system in comparison with the results when they guessed them without the system.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.1-21
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• 2020

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, various techniques have been developed to extract meaningful information from unstructured text data which constitutes a large portion of big data. Over the past decades, text mining technologies have been utilized in various industries for practical applications. In the field of business intelligence, it has been employed to discover new market and/or technology opportunities and support rational decision making of business participants. The market information such as market size, market growth rate, and market share is essential for setting companies' business strategies. There has been a continuous demand in various fields for specific product level-market information. However, the information has been generally provided at industry level or broad categories based on classification standards, making it difficult to obtain specific and proper information. In this regard, we propose a new methodology that can estimate the market sizes of product groups at more detailed levels than that of previously offered. We applied Word2Vec algorithm, a neural network based semantic word embedding model, to enable automatic market size estimation from individual companies' product information in a bottom-up manner. The overall process is as follows: First, the data related to product information is collected, refined, and restructured into suitable form for applying Word2Vec model. Next, the preprocessed data is embedded into vector space by Word2Vec and then the product groups are derived by extracting similar products names based on cosine similarity calculation. Finally, the sales data on the extracted products is summated to estimate the market size of the product groups. As an experimental data, text data of product names from Statistics Korea's microdata (345,103 cases) were mapped in multidimensional vector space by Word2Vec training. We performed parameters optimization for training and then applied vector dimension of 300 and window size of 15 as optimized parameters for further experiments. We employed index words of Korean Standard Industry Classification (KSIC) as a product name dataset to more efficiently cluster product groups. The product names which are similar to KSIC indexes were extracted based on cosine similarity. The market size of extracted products as one product category was calculated from individual companies' sales data. The market sizes of 11,654 specific product lines were automatically estimated by the proposed model. For the performance verification, the results were compared with actual market size of some items. The Pearson's correlation coefficient was 0.513. Our approach has several advantages differing from the previous studies. First, text mining and machine learning techniques were applied for the first time on market size estimation, overcoming the limitations of traditional sampling based- or multiple assumption required-methods. In addition, the level of market category can be easily and efficiently adjusted according to the purpose of information use by changing cosine similarity threshold. Furthermore, it has a high potential of practical applications since it can resolve unmet needs for detailed market size information in public and private sectors. Specifically, it can be utilized in technology evaluation and technology commercialization support program conducted by governmental institutions, as well as business strategies consulting and market analysis report publishing by private firms. The limitation of our study is that the presented model needs to be improved in terms of accuracy and reliability. The semantic-based word embedding module can be advanced by giving a proper order in the preprocessed dataset or by combining another algorithm such as Jaccard similarity with Word2Vec. Also, the methods of product group clustering can be changed to other types of unsupervised machine learning algorithm. Our group is currently working on subsequent studies and we expect that it can further improve the performance of the conceptually proposed basic model in this study.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.1-21
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• 2012

In recent years, mobile phone has experienced an extremely fast evolution. It is equipped with high-quality color displays, high resolution cameras, and real-time accelerated 3D graphics. In addition, some other features are includes GPS sensor and Digital Compass, etc. This evolution advent significantly helps the application developers to use the power of smart-phones, to create a rich environment that offers a wide range of services and exciting possibilities. To date mobile AR in outdoor research there are many popular location-based AR services, such Layar and Wikitude. These systems have big limitation the AR contents hardly overlaid on the real target. Another research is context-based AR services using image recognition and tracking. The AR contents are precisely overlaid on the real target. But the real-time performance is restricted by the retrieval time and hardly implement in large scale area. In our work, we exploit to combine advantages of location-based AR with context-based AR. The system can easily find out surrounding landmarks first and then do the recognition and tracking with them. The proposed system mainly consists of two major parts-landmark browsing module and annotation module. In landmark browsing module, user can view an augmented virtual information (information media), such as text, picture and video on their smart-phone viewfinder, when they pointing out their smart-phone to a certain building or landmark. For this, landmark recognition technique is applied in this work. SURF point-based features are used in the matching process due to their robustness. To ensure the image retrieval and matching processes is fast enough for real time tracking, we exploit the contextual device (GPS and digital compass) information. This is necessary to select the nearest and pointed orientation landmarks from the database. The queried image is only matched with this selected data. Therefore, the speed for matching will be significantly increased. Secondly is the annotation module. Instead of viewing only the augmented information media, user can create virtual annotation based on linked data. Having to know a full knowledge about the landmark, are not necessary required. They can simply look for the appropriate topic by searching it with a keyword in linked data. With this, it helps the system to find out target URI in order to generate correct AR contents. On the other hand, in order to recognize target landmarks, images of selected building or landmark are captured from different angle and distance. This procedure looks like a similar processing of building a connection between the real building and the virtual information existed in the Linked Open Data. In our experiments, search range in the database is reduced by clustering images into groups according to their coordinates. A Grid-base clustering method and user location information are used to restrict the retrieval range. Comparing the existed research using cluster and GPS information the retrieval time is around 70~80ms. Experiment results show our approach the retrieval time reduces to around 18~20ms in average. Therefore the totally processing time is reduced from 490~540ms to 438~480ms. The performance improvement will be more obvious when the database growing. It demonstrates the proposed system is efficient and robust in many cases.