• Journal of the Korea Institute of Building Construction
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.305-316
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• 2022

Domestic construction companies have difficulty in establishing strategies when entering overseas markets because they do not have an overseas construction economic sentiment index to refer to for data on overseas construction prospects. Considering that the fluctuation of overseas construction orders over the past decade has been substantial and large companies and SMEs are actively advancing overseas, this study developed an evaluation model for an overseas construction business sentiment index to grasp the economic experience of overseas construction companies. In 2021 Korean companies earned 30.6 billion in overseas construction contracts, 87% the level of the previous year, despite difficulties such as COVID-19 and low oil prices, thanks to efforts by construction companies to strengthen their strategies for entry, such as regional diversification, and government support for winning orders. Since the overseas construction industry fluctuates greatly due to changes in the international environment, it is necessary to investigate and analyze the economic sentiment index of overseas construction companies. In particular, despite the increase in overseas expansion of small and medium-sized construction companies and engineering companies, the provision of information on the overseas construction market sentiment index is insufficient, limiting the establishment of strategies for overseas construction expansion. Therefore, this study intends to develop an overseas construction market sentiment index model that can understand the economic sentiment of overseas construction companies, provide a forecast for overseas construction, and use it to establish overseas construction strategies and policies.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.1335-1351
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• 2015

In order to effectively understand the perception of businesses and consumers, the Bank of Korea has released Economic Sentiment Index (ESI), a composite indicator of business survey index (BSI) and consumer survey index (CSI), since 2102. The usefulness of ESI has been widely recognized. However, there exists a margin for improvement in terms of its predictive power. In this study, we evaluated the usefulness of ESI and improved the ESI by complementing its defaults. Our results of empirical analysis proved that dynamic optimal weight navigation process using the sliding window method is very useful in determining the optimal weights of configurations item of ESI based on economic situation.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.159-172
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• 2020

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to investigate economic variables which have impact on the prices and returns of preferred stocks and to provide investors, underwriters, and policy makers with information regarding correlations and causal relations between them. Design/methodology/approach - This study collected 98 monthly data from Korea Exchange and Bank of Korea. The Granger causal relation analysis, unit-root test and the multiple regression analysis were hired in order to analyze the data. Findings - First, our study derives the economic variables affecting the prices and returns of preferred stocks and their implications, while previous studies focused mainly on the differential characteristics and related economic factors between common and preferred stocks. Empirical results show that the significant variables influencing the prices and returns of preffered stocks are consumer sentiment index, consumer price index, industrial production index, KOSPI volatility index, and exchange rate between Korean won and US dollar. Second, consumer sentiment index, consumer price index, and industrial production index have significant casual relations with the returns of preferred stocks, providing market participants with important information regarding investment in preferred stocks. Research implications or Originality - This study is different from previous studies in that preferred stocks themselves are investigated rather than the gap between common stocks and preferred stocks. In addition, we derive the major macro variables affecting the prices and returns of preferred stocks and find some useful causal relations between the macro variables and returns of preferred stocks. These findings give important implications to market participants, including stock investors, underwriters, and policy makers.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.45-56
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• 2018

The paper aims to examine relationships between search-based sentiment and stock market reactions in Vietnam. This study constructs an internet search-based measure of sentiment and examines its relationship with Vietnamese stock market returns. The sentiment index is derived from Google Trends' Search Volume Index of financial and economic terms that Vietnamese searched from January 2011 to June 2018. Consistent with prediction from sentiment theories, the study documents significant short-term reversals across three major stock indices. The difference from previous literature is that Vietnam stock market absorbs the contemporaneous decline slower while the subsequent rebound happens within a day. The results of the study suggest that the sentiment-induced effect is mainly driven by pessimism. On the other hand, optimistic investors seem to delay in taking their investment action until the market corrects. The study proposes a unified explanation for our findings based on the overreaction hypothesis of the bearish group and the strategic delay of the optimistic group. The findings of the study contribute to the behavioral finance strand that studies the role of sentiment in emerging financial markets, where noise traders and limits to arbitrage are more obvious. They also encourage the continuous application of search data to explore other investor behaviors in securities markets.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.79-108
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• 2022

This study examines the impact of sentiment shock, which is defined as a stochastic innovation to the Housing Market Confidence Index (HMCI) that is orthogonal to past housing price changes, on aggregate housing price changes and housing price volatility. This paper documents empirical evidence that sentiment shock has a statistically significant relationship with Korea's aggregate housing price changes. Specifically, the key findings show that an increase in sentiment shock predicts a rise in the aggregate housing price and a drop in its volatility at the national level. For the Seoul Metropolitan Region (SMR), this study also suggests that sentiment shock is positively associated with one-month-ahead aggregate housing price changes, whereas an increase in sentiment volatility tends to increase housing price volatility as well. In addition, the out-of-sample forecasting exercises conducted here reveal that the prediction model endowed with sentiment shock and sentiment volatility outperforms other competing prediction models.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.209-216
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• 2024

Real estate market prices are determined by various factors, including macroeconomic variables, as well as the influence of a variety of unstructured text data such as news articles and social media. News articles are a crucial factor in predicting real estate transaction prices as they reflect the economic sentiment of the public. This study utilizes sentiment analysis on news articles to generate a News Sentiment Index score, which is then seamlessly integrated into a real estate price prediction model. To calculate the sentiment index, the content of the articles is first summarized. Then, using AI, the summaries are categorized into positive, negative, and neutral sentiments, and a total score is calculated. This score is then applied to the real estate price prediction model. The models used for real estate price prediction include the Multi-head attention LSTM model and the Vector Auto Regression model. The LSTM prediction model, without applying the News Sentiment Index (NSI), showed Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) values of 0.60, 0.872, and 1.117 for the 1-month, 2-month, and 3-month forecasts, respectively. With the NSI applied, the RMSE values were reduced to 0.40, 0.724, and 1.03 for the same forecast periods. Similarly, the VAR prediction model without the NSI showed RMSE values of 1.6484, 0.6254, and 0.9220 for the 1-month, 2-month, and 3-month forecasts, respectively, while applying the NSI led to RMSE values of 1.1315, 0.3413, and 1.6227 for these periods. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in predicting apartment transaction price index and its ability to forecast real estate market price fluctuations that reflect socio-economic trends.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.95-110
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• 2013

Recently, the amount of unstructured data being generated through a variety of social media has been increasing rapidly, resulting in the increasing need to collect, store, search for, analyze, and visualize this data. This kind of data cannot be handled appropriately by using the traditional methodologies usually used for analyzing structured data because of its vast volume and unstructured nature. In this situation, many attempts are being made to analyze unstructured data such as text files and log files through various commercial or noncommercial analytical tools. Among the various contemporary issues dealt with in the literature of unstructured text data analysis, the concepts and techniques of opinion mining have been attracting much attention from pioneer researchers and business practitioners. Opinion mining or sentiment analysis refers to a series of processes that analyze participants' opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions about selected products, services, organizations, social issues, and so on. In other words, many attempts based on various opinion mining techniques are being made to resolve complicated issues that could not have otherwise been solved by existing traditional approaches. One of the most representative attempts using the opinion mining technique may be the recent research that proposed an intelligent model for predicting the direction of the stock index. This model works mainly on the basis of opinions extracted from an overwhelming number of economic news repots. News content published on various media is obviously a traditional example of unstructured text data. Every day, a large volume of new content is created, digitalized, and subsequently distributed to us via online or offline channels. Many studies have revealed that we make better decisions on political, economic, and social issues by analyzing news and other related information. In this sense, we expect to predict the fluctuation of stock markets partly by analyzing the relationship between economic news reports and the pattern of stock prices. So far, in the literature on opinion mining, most studies including ours have utilized a sentiment dictionary to elicit sentiment polarity or sentiment value from a large number of documents. A sentiment dictionary consists of pairs of selected words and their sentiment values. Sentiment classifiers refer to the dictionary to formulate the sentiment polarity of words, sentences in a document, and the whole document. However, most traditional approaches have common limitations in that they do not consider the flexibility of sentiment polarity, that is, the sentiment polarity or sentiment value of a word is fixed and cannot be changed in a traditional sentiment dictionary. In the real world, however, the sentiment polarity of a word can vary depending on the time, situation, and purpose of the analysis. It can also be contradictory in nature. The flexibility of sentiment polarity motivated us to conduct this study. In this paper, we have stated that sentiment polarity should be assigned, not merely on the basis of the inherent meaning of a word but on the basis of its ad hoc meaning within a particular context. To implement our idea, we presented an intelligent investment decision-support model based on opinion mining that performs the scrapping and parsing of massive volumes of economic news on the web, tags sentiment words, classifies sentiment polarity of the news, and finally predicts the direction of the next day's stock index. In addition, we applied a domain-specific sentiment dictionary instead of a general purpose one to classify each piece of news as either positive or negative. For the purpose of performance evaluation, we performed intensive experiments and investigated the prediction accuracy of our model. For the experiments to predict the direction of the stock index, we gathered and analyzed 1,072 articles about stock markets published by "M" and "E" media between July 2011 and September 2011.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.8 no.11
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• pp.383-391
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• 2017

This study examines the relationship between sentiment of speculators and price movements in the futures markets of WTI crude oil, copper, and wheat during the period 2003~2014 using Granger causality tests. The results indicate that speculative positions overall has no predictive power for returns in each futures market. Rather, returns seem to have effects on speculators' sentiment especially during periods of both economic expansion and recovery. During a recession, meanwhile, changes of speculators' sentiment index in the WTI crude oil and copper markets provide predictive power for returns in a positive direction, suggesting that speculators' pessimistic sentiment aggravates declines in commodity prices. Since the effects of speculative positions on market prices are ambiguous, tight regulations on speculative trading are not advisable. In a bearish market, however, regulatory bodies should consider raising speculative position limits because large speculative short positions and (or) liquidation of index traders' long positions may lead steep price declines.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.33-56
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• 2016

Many researchers have focused on developing bankruptcy prediction models using modeling techniques, such as statistical methods including multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) and logit analysis or artificial intelligence techniques containing artificial neural networks (ANN), decision trees, and support vector machines (SVM), to secure enhanced performance. Most of the bankruptcy prediction models in academic studies have used financial ratios as main input variables. The bankruptcy of firms is associated with firm's financial states and the external economic situation. However, the inclusion of qualitative information, such as the economic atmosphere, has not been actively discussed despite the fact that exploiting only financial ratios has some drawbacks. Accounting information, such as financial ratios, is based on past data, and it is usually determined one year before bankruptcy. Thus, a time lag exists between the point of closing financial statements and the point of credit evaluation. In addition, financial ratios do not contain environmental factors, such as external economic situations. Therefore, using only financial ratios may be insufficient in constructing a bankruptcy prediction model, because they essentially reflect past corporate internal accounting information while neglecting recent information. Thus, qualitative information must be added to the conventional bankruptcy prediction model to supplement accounting information. Due to the lack of an analytic mechanism for obtaining and processing qualitative information from various information sources, previous studies have only used qualitative information. However, recently, big data analytics, such as text mining techniques, have been drawing much attention in academia and industry, with an increasing amount of unstructured text data available on the web. A few previous studies have sought to adopt big data analytics in business prediction modeling. Nevertheless, the use of qualitative information on the web for business prediction modeling is still deemed to be in the primary stage, restricted to limited applications, such as stock prediction and movie revenue prediction applications. Thus, it is necessary to apply big data analytics techniques, such as text mining, to various business prediction problems, including credit risk evaluation. Analytic methods are required for processing qualitative information represented in unstructured text form due to the complexity of managing and processing unstructured text data. This study proposes a bankruptcy prediction model for Korean small- and medium-sized construction firms using both quantitative information, such as financial ratios, and qualitative information acquired from economic news articles. The performance of the proposed method depends on how well information types are transformed from qualitative into quantitative information that is suitable for incorporating into the bankruptcy prediction model. We employ big data analytics techniques, especially text mining, as a mechanism for processing qualitative information. The sentiment index is provided at the industry level by extracting from a large amount of text data to quantify the external economic atmosphere represented in the media. The proposed method involves keyword-based sentiment analysis using a domain-specific sentiment lexicon to extract sentiment from economic news articles. The generated sentiment lexicon is designed to represent sentiment for the construction business by considering the relationship between the occurring term and the actual situation with respect to the economic condition of the industry rather than the inherent semantics of the term. The experimental results proved that incorporating qualitative information based on big data analytics into the traditional bankruptcy prediction model based on accounting information is effective for enhancing the predictive performance. The sentiment variable extracted from economic news articles had an impact on corporate bankruptcy. In particular, a negative sentiment variable improved the accuracy of corporate bankruptcy prediction because the corporate bankruptcy of construction firms is sensitive to poor economic conditions. The bankruptcy prediction model using qualitative information based on big data analytics contributes to the field, in that it reflects not only relatively recent information but also environmental factors, such as external economic conditions.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.125-135
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• 2022

This study aims to explore variables using machine learning and provide analysis techniques suitable for predicting pharmacy sales whether government statistical indicators built to create an industrial ecosystem based on data, network, and artificial intelligence affect pharmacy sales. Therefore, this study explored predictive variables and performance through machine learning techniques such as Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost using analysis data from January 2016 to December 2021 for 28 government statistical indicators and pharmacies in the retail sector. As a result of the analysis, economic sentiment index, economic accompanying index circulation change, and consumer sentiment index, which are economic indicators, were found to be important variables affecting pharmacy sales. As a result of examining the indicators MAE, MSE, and RMSE for regression performance, random forests showed the best performance than XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost. Therefore, this study presented variables and optimal machine learning techniques that affect pharmacy sales based on machine learning results, and proposed several implications and follow-up studies.