• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.125-150
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• 2021

The paper investigates investor sentiment's role in boosting Japanese companies to enhance their environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) performance. Using ESG scores of 367 firms between 2005 and 2019 from the ASSET4 database, we find that negative sentiment in the previous year, both firm and market level, can be a stimulation for the company's commitments to its ESG activities next year. Notably, the moderating effect of the business sector and economic cycle on the sentiment-ESG inference are detected in our study differentiating between corporate and market sentiment, which have never been reported before. In detail, we discover that the impact of firm-specific sentiment is less pronounced for high-sensitive ESG firms. On the other hand, the driving force of market sentiment on corporate social behaviors weakens when economic recessions happen. Our results are robust after controlling for potential endogeneity issues and using alternative proxies for market sentiment.

• Journal of East Asia Management
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.41-55
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• 2022

This study investigates whether foreign investors' behavior is involved in firm-specific investor sentiment. Because the mixed role of foreign investors on investor sentiment formation seems to exist in the Korean stock market, it needs to examine the moderate or incremental effect of foreign investors on the stock price crash risk which is due to investor sentiment. The analysis results using Korea Stock Exchanges - listed firms for the period of 2011-2019 show the increased future stock price crash risk which is attributable to high investor sentiment is mitigated for firms with the high foreign ownership, indicating the moderate effect. This study expands the literature on the foreign investors' behavior in the Korean stock market, by showing foreign investors are not involved in firm-specific investor sentiment, which improves market's efficiency in the Korean stock market. Also, the paper is valuable to the academic and practice field in that the findings shed light on the foreign investors' mitigating role in stock price crashes in the behavioral finance perspective.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.89-105
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• 2014

After emergence of Internet, social media with highly interactive Web 2.0 applications has provided very user friendly means for consumers and companies to communicate with each other. Users have routinely published contents involving their opinions and interests in social media such as blogs, forums, chatting rooms, and discussion boards, and the contents are released real-time in the Internet. For that reason, many researchers and marketers regard social media contents as the source of information for business analytics to develop business insights, and many studies have reported results on mining business intelligence from Social media content. In particular, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, as a technique to extract, classify, understand, and assess the opinions implicit in text contents, are frequently applied into social media content analysis because it emphasizes determining sentiment polarity and extracting authors' opinions. A number of frameworks, methods, techniques and tools have been presented by these researchers. However, we have found some weaknesses from their methods which are often technically complicated and are not sufficiently user-friendly for helping business decisions and planning. In this study, we attempted to formulate a more comprehensive and practical approach to conduct opinion mining with visual deliverables. First, we described the entire cycle of practical opinion mining using Social media content from the initial data gathering stage to the final presentation session. Our proposed approach to opinion mining consists of four phases: collecting, qualifying, analyzing, and visualizing. In the first phase, analysts have to choose target social media. Each target media requires different ways for analysts to gain access. There are open-API, searching tools, DB2DB interface, purchasing contents, and so son. Second phase is pre-processing to generate useful materials for meaningful analysis. If we do not remove garbage data, results of social media analysis will not provide meaningful and useful business insights. To clean social media data, natural language processing techniques should be applied. The next step is the opinion mining phase where the cleansed social media content set is to be analyzed. The qualified data set includes not only user-generated contents but also content identification information such as creation date, author name, user id, content id, hit counts, review or reply, favorite, etc. Depending on the purpose of the analysis, researchers or data analysts can select a suitable mining tool. Topic extraction and buzz analysis are usually related to market trends analysis, while sentiment analysis is utilized to conduct reputation analysis. There are also various applications, such as stock prediction, product recommendation, sales forecasting, and so on. The last phase is visualization and presentation of analysis results. The major focus and purpose of this phase are to explain results of analysis and help users to comprehend its meaning. Therefore, to the extent possible, deliverables from this phase should be made simple, clear and easy to understand, rather than complex and flashy. To illustrate our approach, we conducted a case study on a leading Korean instant noodle company. We targeted the leading company, NS Food, with 66.5% of market share; the firm has kept No. 1 position in the Korean "Ramen" business for several decades. We collected a total of 11,869 pieces of contents including blogs, forum contents and news articles. After collecting social media content data, we generated instant noodle business specific language resources for data manipulation and analysis using natural language processing. In addition, we tried to classify contents in more detail categories such as marketing features, environment, reputation, etc. In those phase, we used free ware software programs such as TM, KoNLP, ggplot2 and plyr packages in R project. As the result, we presented several useful visualization outputs like domain specific lexicons, volume and sentiment graphs, topic word cloud, heat maps, valence tree map, and other visualized images to provide vivid, full-colored examples using open library software packages of the R project. Business actors can quickly detect areas by a swift glance that are weak, strong, positive, negative, quiet or loud. Heat map is able to explain movement of sentiment or volume in categories and time matrix which shows density of color on time periods. Valence tree map, one of the most comprehensive and holistic visualization models, should be very helpful for analysts and decision makers to quickly understand the "big picture" business situation with a hierarchical structure since tree-map can present buzz volume and sentiment with a visualized result in a certain period. This case study offers real-world business insights from market sensing which would demonstrate to practical-minded business users how they can use these types of results for timely decision making in response to on-going changes in the market. We believe our approach can provide practical and reliable guide to opinion mining with visualized results that are immediately useful, not just in food industry but in other industries as well.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.237-262
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• 2022

There has been a growing interest in IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) due to the profitable returns that IPO stocks can offer to investors. However, IPOs can be speculative investments that may involve substantial risk as well because shares tend to be volatile, and the supply of IPO shares is often highly limited. Therefore, it is crucially important that IPO investors are well informed of the issuing firms and the market before deciding whether to invest or not. Unlike institutional investors, individual investors are at a disadvantage since there are few opportunities for individuals to obtain information on the IPOs. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to provide individual investors with the information they may consider when making an IPO investment decision. This study presents a model that uses machine learning and text analysis to predict whether an IPO stock price would move up or down after the first 5 trading days. Our sample includes 691 Korean IPOs from June 2009 to December 2020. The input variables for the prediction are three tone variables created from IPO prospectuses and quantitative variables that are either firm-specific, issue-specific, or market-specific. The three prospectus tone variables indicate the percentage of positive, neutral, and negative sentences in a prospectus, respectively. We considered only the sentences in the Risk Factors section of a prospectus for the tone analysis in this study. All sentences were classified into 'positive', 'neutral', and 'negative' via text analysis using TF-IDF (Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency). Measuring the tone of each sentence was conducted by machine learning instead of a lexicon-based approach due to the lack of sentiment dictionaries suitable for Korean text analysis in the context of finance. For this reason, the training set was created by randomly selecting 10% of the sentences from each prospectus, and the sentence classification task on the training set was performed after reading each sentence in person. Then, based on the training set, a Support Vector Machine model was utilized to predict the tone of sentences in the test set. Finally, the machine learning model calculated the percentages of positive, neutral, and negative sentences in each prospectus. To predict the price movement of an IPO stock, four different machine learning techniques were applied: Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and Artificial Neural Network. According to the results, models that use quantitative variables using technical analysis and prospectus tone variables together show higher accuracy than models that use only quantitative variables. More specifically, the prediction accuracy was improved by 1.45% points in the Random Forest model, 4.34% points in the Artificial Neural Network model, and 5.07% points in the Support Vector Machine model. After testing the performance of these machine learning techniques, the Artificial Neural Network model using both quantitative variables and prospectus tone variables was the model with the highest prediction accuracy rate, which was 61.59%. The results indicate that the tone of a prospectus is a significant factor in predicting the price movement of an IPO stock. In addition, the McNemar test was used to verify the statistically significant difference between the models. The model using only quantitative variables and the model using both the quantitative variables and the prospectus tone variables were compared, and it was confirmed that the predictive performance improved significantly at a 1% significance level.