• International Journal of Contents
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.62-78
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• 2021

This ethnographic multiple case study, based on Zappa-Hollman and Duff's construct of individual networks of practice (INoPs), explored English as a second language (L2) competence development and socialization process of a group of English-major undergraduates through their social connections and interactions at a public university located in an underdeveloped city in Northwest China. The study lasted for one academic semester and three students were selected as primary participants. Semi-structured interviews, student observations in English-related micro-settings, and associated texts were used to collect data. These data were coded to identify the thematic categories, and then data triangulation and member checking were conducted to select the most representative evidence to provide an in-depth description of students' perspective about mediating their English L2 socialization by their INoPs. Findings showed that factors in the formation of students' INoPs, including intensity, density, and nature, played significant roles in their academic or affective returns from their English learning, both of which had a substantial influence on the students' English L2 socialization. Considering that the macro-setting was a non-English, underdeveloped monolingual society, both educational institutions and individual students need to seek and create more English-mediated interactional opportunities to develop their English proficiency and adapt to local English learning communities.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.73-81
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• 2024

Recently, mobile manipulators have been utilized in agriculture industry for weed removal and harvest automation. This paper proposes a domain adaptive fruit detection method for harvest automation, by utilizing OWL-ViT model which is an open-vocabulary object detection model. The vision-language model can detect objects based on text prompt, and therefore, it can be extended to detect objects of undefined categories. In the development of deep learning models for real-world problems, constructing a large-scale labeled dataset is a time-consuming task and heavily relies on human effort. To reduce the labor-intensive workload, we utilized a large-scale public dataset as a source domain data and employed a domain adaptation method. Adversarial learning was conducted between a domain discriminator and feature extractor to reduce the gap between the distribution of feature vectors from the source domain and our target domain data. We collected a target domain dataset in a real-like environment and conducted experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In experiments, the domain adaptation method improved the AP50 metric from 38.88% to 78.59% for detecting objects within the range of 2m, and we achieved 81.7% of manipulation success rate.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.35
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• pp.315-338
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to propose actual operation condition of Japanese lecture based on social welfare organizations located in Seoul to investigate the current status and problems of Japanese language education in terms of lifelong education. According to the result of this study, the remarkable point was that a majority of Japanese lecture courses are highly focused on the elderly and 86% of the welfare organizations are providing free education. Regarding the effect of specialized business for the aged run by social welfare community center, it says, as Korea changing to aging society at the beginning of 21st century, it has put focus on strengthening personal competences of seniors through opportunities for participation in lifelong education, recreational activity programs and culture classes. It means foreign language classes are operating as one of the lifelong education programs for reinforcement of individual capability. Considering this tendency, it is expected that the lifelong education participation rate of the elder in Seoul will be raised. So, systematic improvements will be needed for this. First, it is required to recognize the existence of Educational and Cultural Industry and work hard to make it public so it could be invigorated and utilized by people usefully at the same time. Second, Japanese language training that mostly 55-year-old or more than 60-year-old people receive at the welfare center needs to be systematized for preparations on proper studying environment which provides the older with appropriate education method and content as well. Third, stable and systematic operation should be available through the link with experts in the field of Japanese language education and elderly education. Fourth, education program development is needed, which is able to satisfy one's desires for learning. Hence, targeting Japanese learners at each welfare center, we need to know the estimation of satisfaction degree and consciousness on learning Japanese. Finally, it has not been studied sufficiently regarding the instructors on teaching Japanese language in this paper, but it has been reported that most of social welfare centers, where Japanese language lectures are provided, are run by volunteers who can teach Japanese. Thus, the study on actual condition for Japanese language instructors will be conducted as well later on.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.401-418
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• 2023

Recently, the socio-economic interest in Large Language Models (LLMs) has been growing due to the emergence of ChatGPT. As a type of generative AI, LLMs have reached the level of script creation. In this regard, it is important to address the issue of discrimination (sexism, racism, religious discrimination, ageism, etc.) in the performing arts in general or in specific performing arts works or organizations in a large language model that will be widely used by the general public and professionals. However, there has not yet been a full-scale investigation and discussion on the issue of discrimination in the performing arts in large-scale language models. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to textually analyze the perceptions of discrimination issues in the performing arts from LMMs and to derive implications for the performing arts field and the development of LMMs. First, BBQ (Bias Benchmark for QA) questions and measures for nine discrimination issues were used to measure the sensitivity to discrimination of the giant language models, and the answers derived from the representative giant language models were verified by performing arts experts to see if there were any parts of the giant language models' misperceptions, and then the giant language models' perceptions of the ethics of discriminatory views in the performing arts field were analyzed through the content analysis method. As a result of the analysis, implications for the performing arts field and points to be noted in the development of large-scale linguistic models were derived and discussed.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.213-235
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• 2011

The aim of this study is to present preliminary results from an ongoing large-scale study of English-language future goal orientations held by Japanese university students. The work here involves an investigation of learners in multiple disciplines, from five universities, both public and private, in the Kanto-region of Japan, and their perspective on their future use of English. The results summarize written essays on L2-goal orientations. Preliminary results indicate Japanese learners (n = 629) as a whole have disparate L2-learning goals; however, these can be summarized into four broad categories: career, personal life, study, and general; and early findings indicate that most learners (63.56%) are oriented to career or personal goal orientations, while others are oriented to study and general. These early results help us to gain a better understanding of the future goals of Japanese university learners and their views of English usage in the future.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.99-106
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• 2004

In this paper we introduce PubMiner, an intelligent machine learning based text mining system for mining biological information from the literature. PubMiner employs natural language processing techniques and machine learning based data mining techniques for mining useful biological information such as protein­protein interaction from the massive literature. The system recognizes biological terms such as gene, protein, and enzymes and extracts their interactions described in the document through natural language processing. The extracted interactions are further analyzed with a set of features of each entity that were collected from the related public databases to infer more interactions from the original interactions. An inferred interaction from the interaction analysis and native interaction are provided to the user with the link of literature sources. The performance of entity and interaction extraction was tested with selected MEDLINE abstracts. The evaluation of inference proceeded using the protein interaction data of S. cerevisiae (bakers yeast) from MIPS and SGD.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.41-44
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose a novel method for developing expressive typography authoring tools with personal emotions. Our goal is to implement an interactive typography system that does not rely on any particular language and provides an easy, natural user interface and allows for immediate interaction. For this purpose, we converted the text data entered by a user to image data. The image data was then used for interaction with the user. The data was synchronized with the user's skeleton information obtained from the depth camera. We decomposed the characters using the formality of language to provide a typographical movement that responds more dynamically to the user's motion. Thus, this system provides interaction as a unit of characters rather than as a whole character, allowing the user to have emotional and aesthetic emotional immersion into his or her creation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.461-482
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• 2008

The science fiction was established as a typical genre of the American popular culture by the monumental releases of two series: Star Wars and Star Trek. Based on the popular science discourse, these two series have functioned as an ideological apparatus for re-appropriating Frontierism which reflects the essential values of American myth. Arguably, the SF genre owes its success mainly to the increasing popularity of science during the 1960s and 1970s, which was well represented in the space project of NASA. This power of popular science, however, tended to weaken in the 1990s as the public interest in NASA's project gradually decreased. "Deep Space Homer," an episode of The Simpson's fifth season, reflects the changing attitude of the American audience toward the new American hero created in the SF series of popular science in the previous popular culture.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.322-336
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• 2022

South Korea is in the limelight in the past decades as Korean universities races for internationalization. As the number of students studying abroad tremendously increasing, there has been a growing need for higher education institutions to understand international working students' life satisfaction and sense of belonging. The aim of this research is to outline which determinants affects life satisfaction as mediated by sense of belonging. With the samples size of 102 respondents, the proposed research model was examined using structural equation modeling (SEM) and SPSS. Results show that all determinants (Recognition, Quality of Education, Experienced Difficulties in Public Service and Understanding Korean Language) were positively significant toward Sense of Belonging. Likewise sense of belonging holds the positive indirect significant effects of the four determinants to life satisfaction.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.440-448
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• 2023

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to assess predictors of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in elderly Asian American and non-Hispanic White cancer survivors. Methods: We conducted cross-sectional secondary data analyses using the combined datasets from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program and the Medicare Health Outcomes Survey. Results: Elderly Asian American cancer survivors reported a lower mental HRQoL but a comparable physical HRQoL relative to elderly non-Hispanic White cancer survivors. Stress factors, such as comorbidities, difficulties with activities of daily living, and a history of depressive symptoms, along with coping resources like self-rated health and the ability to take the survey in English, were significantly associated with mental and physical HRQoL. Among elderly Asian American cancer survivors, a significantly lower mental HRQoL was observed among those taking the survey in the Chinese language. Conclusions: The findings suggest that race exerts a differential impact on HRQoL. Interventions should be designed to address the distinct cultural, linguistic, and systemic needs of elderly Asian American cancer survivors. Such an approach could assist in reducing cancer-related health disparities.