• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.63-82
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• 2016

Individuals gather information online to resolve problems in their daily lives and make various decisions about the purchase of products or services. With the revolutionary development of information technology, Web 2.0 has allowed more people to easily generate and use online reviews such that the volume of information is rapidly increasing, and the usefulness and significance of analyzing the unstructured data have also increased. This paper presents an analysis on the lexical features of expert product reviews to determine their influence on consumers' purchasing decisions. The focus was on how unstructured data can be organized and used in diverse contexts through text mining. In addition, diverse lexical features of expert reviews of contents provided by a third-party review site were extracted and defined. Expert reviews are defined as evaluations by people who have expert knowledge about specific products or services in newspapers or magazines; this type of review is also called a critic review. Consumers who purchased products before the widespread use of the Internet were able to access expert reviews through newspapers or magazines; thus, they were not able to access many of them. Recently, however, major media also now provide online services so that people can more easily and affordably access expert reviews compared to the past. The reason why diverse reviews from experts in several fields are important is that there is an information asymmetry where some information is not shared among consumers and sellers. The information asymmetry can be resolved with information provided by third parties with expertise to consumers. Then, consumers can read expert reviews and make purchasing decisions by considering the abundant information on products or services. Therefore, expert reviews play an important role in consumers' purchasing decisions and the performance of companies across diverse industries. If the influence of qualitative data such as reviews or assessment after the purchase of products can be separately identified from the quantitative data resources, such as the actual quality of products or price, it is possible to identify which aspects of product reviews hamper or promote product sales. Previous studies have focused on the characteristics of the experts themselves, such as the expertise and credibility of sources regarding expert reviews; however, these studies did not suggest the influence of the linguistic features of experts' product reviews on consumers' overall evaluation. However, this study focused on experts' recommendations and evaluations to reveal the lexical features of expert reviews and whether such features influence consumers' overall evaluations and purchasing decisions. Real expert product reviews were analyzed based on the suggested methodology, and five lexical features of expert reviews were ultimately determined. Specifically, the "review depth" (i.e., degree of detail of the expert's product analysis), and "lack of assurance" (i.e., degree of confidence that the expert has in the evaluation) have statistically significant effects on consumers' product evaluations. In contrast, the "positive polarity" (i.e., the degree of positivity of an expert's evaluations) has an insignificant effect, while the "negative polarity" (i.e., the degree of negativity of an expert's evaluations) has a significant negative effect on consumers' product evaluations. Finally, the "social orientation" (i.e., the degree of how many social expressions experts include in their reviews) does not have a significant effect on consumers' product evaluations. In summary, the lexical properties of the product reviews were defined according to each relevant factor. Then, the influence of each linguistic factor of expert reviews on the consumers' final evaluations was tested. In addition, a test was performed on whether each linguistic factor influencing consumers' product evaluations differs depending on the lexical features. The results of these analyses should provide guidelines on how individuals process massive volumes of unstructured data depending on lexical features in various contexts and how companies can use this mechanism from their perspective. This paper provides several theoretical and practical contributions, such as the proposal of a new methodology and its application to real data.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.51-76
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of four influencing variables (brand diversity. product information, entertainment, and trust) on purchase Intention and to .examine whether this relationship varies according to the buyer's perceived level of Product involvement. Analysis of 264 responses using the hierarchical regression indicated that all four independent variables were found positively influencing purchase intention. Furthermore, the effects of brand diversity, product information, and trust on purchase intention were revealed to be moderated by perceived product involvement. However, the moderating effect of product involvement on the relationship between entertainment and purchase intention was not statistically significant. Discussions for research findings and managerial implications are discussed.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.131-137
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• 2018

People write reviews of numerous products or services on the Internet, in their blogs or community bulletin boards. These unstructured data contain important emotions and opinions about the author's product or service, which can provide important information for future product design or marketing. However, this text-based information cannot be evaluated quantitatively, and thus they are difficult to apply to mathematical models or optimization problems for product design and improvement. Therefore, this study proposes a method to quantitatively extract user's opinion or preference about a specific product or service by utilizing a lot of text-based information existing on the Internet or online. The extracted unstructured text information is decomposed into basic unit words, and positive rate is evaluated by using existing emotional dictionaries and additional lists proposed in this study. This can be a way to effectively utilize unstructured text data, which is being generated and stored in vast quantities, in product or service design. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a case study was conducted using movie review data retrieved from a portal website. By comparing the positive rates calculated by the proposed framework with user ratings for movies, a guideline on text mining based evaluation of unstructured data is provided.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.39-70
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• 2017

Data-drive analytics techniques have been recently applied to public surveys. Instead of simply gathering survey results or expert opinions to research the preference for a recently launched product, enterprises need a way to collect and analyze various types of online data and then accurately figure out customer preferences. In the main concept of existing data-based survey methods, the sentiment lexicon for a particular domain is first constructed by domain experts who usually judge the positive, neutral, or negative meanings of the frequently used words from the collected text documents. In order to research the preference for a particular product, the existing approach collects (1) review posts, which are related to the product, from several product review web sites; (2) extracts sentences (or phrases) in the collection after the pre-processing step such as stemming and removal of stop words is performed; (3) classifies the polarity (either positive or negative sense) of each sentence (or phrase) based on the sentiment lexicon; and (4) estimates the positive and negative ratios of the product by dividing the total numbers of the positive and negative sentences (or phrases) by the total number of the sentences (or phrases) in the collection. Furthermore, the existing approach automatically finds important sentences (or phrases) including the positive and negative meaning to/against the product. As a motivated example, given a product like Sonata made by Hyundai Motors, customers often want to see the summary note including what positive points are in the 'car design' aspect as well as what negative points are in thesame aspect. They also want to gain more useful information regarding other aspects such as 'car quality', 'car performance', and 'car service.' Such an information will enable customers to make good choice when they attempt to purchase brand-new vehicles. In addition, automobile makers will be able to figure out the preference and positive/negative points for new models on market. In the near future, the weak points of the models will be improved by the sentiment analysis. For this, the existing approach computes the sentiment score of each sentence (or phrase) and then selects top-k sentences (or phrases) with the highest positive and negative scores. However, the existing approach has several shortcomings and is limited to apply to real applications. The main disadvantages of the existing approach is as follows: (1) The main aspects (e.g., car design, quality, performance, and service) to a product (e.g., Hyundai Sonata) are not considered. Through the sentiment analysis without considering aspects, as a result, the summary note including the positive and negative ratios of the product and top-k sentences (or phrases) with the highest sentiment scores in the entire corpus is just reported to customers and car makers. This approach is not enough and main aspects of the target product need to be considered in the sentiment analysis. (2) In general, since the same word has different meanings across different domains, the sentiment lexicon which is proper to each domain needs to be constructed. The efficient way to construct the sentiment lexicon per domain is required because the sentiment lexicon construction is labor intensive and time consuming. To address the above problems, in this article, we propose a novel product reputation mining algorithm that (1) extracts topics hidden in review documents written by customers; (2) mines main aspects based on the extracted topics; (3) measures the positive and negative ratios of the product using the aspects; and (4) presents the digest in which a few important sentences with the positive and negative meanings are listed in each aspect. Unlike the existing approach, using hidden topics makes experts construct the sentimental lexicon easily and quickly. Furthermore, reinforcing topic semantics, we can improve the accuracy of the product reputation mining algorithms more largely than that of the existing approach. In the experiments, we collected large review documents to the domestic vehicles such as K5, SM5, and Avante; measured the positive and negative ratios of the three cars; showed top-k positive and negative summaries per aspect; and conducted statistical analysis. Our experimental results clearly show the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared with the existing method.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.392-403
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• 2008

User reviews are valuable information that can be used for various purposes. In particular, the product reviews on online shopping sites are important information which can directly affect the purchasing decision of the customers. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of a system for summarizing the customer's opinion and the features of each product by analyzing reviews on a commercial shopping site. During the analysis process, several natural language processing(NLP) techniques and the semantic dictionary were used. The semantic dictionary contains vocabularies that are used to express product features and customer's opinions. And it was constructed in semi-automatic way with the help of the tool we implemented. Furthermore, we discuss how to handle the vocabularies that have different meanings according to the context. We analyzed 1796 reviews about 20 products of 2 categories collected from an actual shopping site and implemented a novel ranking system. We obtained 88.94% for precision and 47.92% for recall on extracting opinion expression, which means our system can be applicable for real use.

• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.13-20
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• 2016

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to discover whether the presence of the product average rating introduces biases or change the way people perceive information. We posit that review's overall rating has a predisposition effect on consumers' perception towards detailed review information. Research design, data, and methodology - To test these hypotheses, we conducted an empirical study on a real-world setting of online shopping platform. We choose the Amazon website to test our results. The data we use were collected by the Stanford Network Analysis Project1 (McAuley et al., 2013). Results - With a dataset containing reviews of seven product categories from amazon.com., our findings could possess more generalizability as they are produced on the typical and influential online market. Second, as our research provides alternative views of consumers' shopping behavior, it is better to test our hypotheses by data from the same source. Conclusions - Our study reveals the impact of the collective rating presence on consumers' diagnosticity perception and sheds light upon some of the conflictive results in prior studies. Our research generates implications to both theories and business practices, and suggests future directions for the research question.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.85-93
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• 2017

Purpose - The volume and valence of online word-of-mouth(eWOM) have become an important part of the retailer's market success for a wide range of products. This study aims to investigate how the growth of eWOM has generated the product's final financial outcomes in the introductory period influences. Research design, data, and methodology - This study uses weekly box office performance for 117 movies released in the South Korea from July 2015 to June 2016 using Korean Film Council(KOFIC) database. 292,371 posted online review messages were collected from NAVER movie review bulletin board. Using regression analysis, we test whether eWOM incurred during the opening week is valuable to explain the last of box office performance. Three major eWOM metrics were considered after controlling for the major distributional factors. Results - Results support that major eWOM variables play a significant role in box-office outcome prediction. Especially, the growth rate of the positive eWOM volume has a significant effect on the growth potential in sales. Conclusions - The findings highlight that the speed of eWOM growth has an informational value to understand the market reaction to a new product beyond valence and volume. Movie distributors need to take positive online eWOM growth into account to make optimal screen allocation decisions after release.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.91-107
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• 2023

With the recent expansion of the commerce ecosystem, a large number of user evaluations have been produced. Accordingly, attempts to create business insights using user evaluation data have been actively made. However, since user evaluation can change after the user experiences the product, it is difficult to say that the analysis based only on reviews immediately after purchase fully reflects the user's evaluation of the product. Moreover, studies conducted so far on user evaluation have overlooked the fact that the length of time a user has used a product can affect the user's product evaluation. Therefore, in this study, we build a model that predicts the direction of change in the user's rating after use from the user's rating and reviews immediately after purchase. In particular, the proposed model reflects the product's period of use in predicting the change direction of the star rating. However, since the posterior information on the duration of product use cannot be used as input in the inference process, we propose a structure that utilizes information about the product's period of use using an auxiliary classifier. As a result of an experiment using 599,889 user evaluation data collected from the shopping platform 'N' company, we confirmed that the proposed model performed better than the existing model in terms of accuracy.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.155-172
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• 2021

With the recent increase in online product purchases, a recommender system that recommends products considering users' preferences has still been studied. The recommender system provides personalized product recommendation services to users. Collaborative Filtering (CF) using user ratings on products is one of the most widely used recommendation algorithms. During CF, the item-based method identifies the user's product by using ratings left on the product purchased by the user and obtains the similarity between the purchased product and the unpurchased product. CF takes a lot of time to calculate the similarity between products. In particular, it takes more time when using text-based big data such as review data of Amazon store. This paper suggests a hybrid recommendation system using a 2-phase methodology and text data mining to calculate the similarity between products easily and quickly. To this end, we collected about 980,000 online consumer ratings and review data from the online commerce store, Amazon Kinder Store. As a result of several experiments, it was confirmed that the suggested hybrid recommendation system reflecting the user's rating and review data has resulted in similar recommendation time, but higher accuracy compared to the CF-based benchmark recommender systems. Therefore, the suggested system is expected to increase the user's satisfaction and increase its sales.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.10
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• pp.5120-5142
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• 2018

Social media enables customers to share their views, opinions and experiences as product reviews. These product reviews facilitate customers in buying quality products. Due to the significance of online reviews, fake reviews, commonly known as spam reviews are generated to mislead the potential customers in decision-making. To cater this issue, review spam detection has become an active research area. Existing studies carried out for review spam detection have exploited feature engineering approach; however limited number of features are considered. This paper proposes a Feature-Centric Model for Review Spam Detection (FMRSD) to detect spam reviews. The proposed model examines a wide range of feature sets including ratings, sentiments, content, and users. The experimentation reveals that the proposed technique outperforms the baseline and provides better results.