• Information Systems Review
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.157-181
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• 2022

As competition in the airline industry intensifies, effective airline service quality evaluation has become one of the main challenges. In particular, as big data analytics has been touted as a new research paradigm, new research on service quality measurement using online review analysis has been attempted. However, these studies do not use review titles for analysis, relyon supervised learning that requires a lot of human intervention in learning, and do not consider airline characteristics in classifying service quality dimensions.To overcome the limitations of existing studies, this study attempts to measure airlines service quality and to classify it into the AIRQUAL service quality dimension using online review text as well as title based on self-trainingand sentiment analysis. The results show the way of effective extracting service quality dimensions of AIRQUAL from online reviews, and find that each service quality dimension have a significant effect on service satisfaction. Furthermore, the effect of review title on service satisfaction is also found to be significant. This study sheds new light on service quality measurement in airline industry by using an advanced analytical approach to analyze effects of service quality on customer satisfaction. This study also helps managers who want to improve customer satisfaction by providing high quality service in airline industry.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.127-154
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• 2017

This study aims to identify various service innovation patterns in the service industry and understand the main differences among them. We attempt to create a new typology of service innovation by analyzing its patterns based on the four major dimensions of service innovation (i.e., service concept, service delivery, customer interaction, and technology). We then investigate whether firms pursuing different service innovation patterns significantly differ from one another in terms of their performance (high and low performance). Based on empirical data collected from 198 Korean firms in the knowledge-intensive business service sector, four major clusters composed of different service innovation dimensions are identified. These four clusters can be interpreted as specific service innovation patterns, including "technology based high customer interaction," "high technology based high service delivery," "service delivery and high customer interaction-integrated," and "strongly balanced" innovators. High firm performance does not depend on the individual service innovation dimension but on the specific configurations of such service dimensions. Customer interaction also has an important role in achieving innovation success and improving firm performance, while technology has a key role in enhancing firm performance. This study sheds new light on service innovation research by developing a new typology of service innovation, identifying four major clusters as service innovation patterns, and exploring the relationship between service innovation patterns and firm performance.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.199-224
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• 2013

Section I of Chapter III ('Obligations of the Buyer') in Part III ('Sale of Goods') of the CISG consists of six articles addressing one of the fundamental buyer obligations described in article 53 of the CISG: the obligation to pay the price. Although the amount of the price that the buyer must pay is usually specified in the contract, two articles in Section I contain rules governing the amount of the price in particular special circumstances: article 55 specifies a price when one is not fixed or provided for in the contract, and article 56 specifies the way to determine the price when it is 'fixed according to the weight of the goods'. The remaining four provisions in Section I relate to the manner of paying the price: they include rules on the buyer's obligation to take steps preparatory to and to comply with formalities required for paying the price (article 54); provisions on the place of payment (article 57) and the time for payment (article 58); and an article dispensing with the need for a formal demand for payment by the seller (article 59). Especially article 53 states the principal obligations of the buyer, and serves as an introduction to the provisions of Chapter III. As the CISG does not define what constitutes a 'sale of goods', article 53, in combination with article 30, also sheds light on this matter. The principal obligations of the buyer are to pay the price for and take delivery of the goods 'as required by the contract and this CISG'. From this phrase, as well as from article six of the CISG, it follows that, where the contract provides for the performance to take place in a manner that differs from that set forth in the CISG, the parties' agreement prevails.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.113-127
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• 2016

Among the techniques for recommendation, collaborative filtering (CF) is commonly recognized to be the most effective for implementing recommender systems. Until now, CF has been popularly studied and adopted in both academic and real-world applications. The basic idea of CF is to create recommendation results by finding correlations between users of a recommendation system. CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and recommend products to users by using other like-minded people's results of evaluation for each product. Thus, it is very important to compute evaluation similarities among users in CF because the recommendation quality depends on it. Typical CF uses user's explicit numeric ratings of items (i.e. quantitative information) when computing the similarities among users in CF. In other words, user's numeric ratings have been a sole source of user preference information in traditional CF. However, user ratings are unable to fully reflect user's actual preferences from time to time. According to several studies, users may more actively accommodate recommendation of reliable others when purchasing goods. Thus, trust relationship can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, we propose a new hybrid recommender system that fuses CF and social network analysis (SNA). The proposed system adopts the recommendation algorithm that additionally reflect the result analyzed by SNA. In detail, our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and trust relationship information between users when calculating user similarities. For this, our system creates and uses not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-to-user trust network. As the methods for calculating user similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is algorithm calculating the degree of similarity between users by utilizing in-degree and out-degree centrality, which are the indices representing the central location in the social network. We named these approaches as 'Trust CF - All' and 'Trust CF - Conditional'. The other alternative is the algorithm reflecting a neighbor's score higher when a target user trusts the neighbor directly or indirectly. The direct or indirect trust relationship can be identified by searching trust network of users. In this study, we call this approach 'Trust CF - Search'. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we used experimental data provided by LibRec that crawled from the entire FilmTrust website. It consists of ratings of movies and trust relationship network indicating who to trust between users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and UCINET 6. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared the performance of our proposed method with one of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender system were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). The analysis results confirmed that in case of applying without conditions the in-degree centrality index of trusted network of users(i.e. Trust CF - All), the accuracy (MAE = 0.565134) was lower than conventional CF (MAE = 0.564966). And, in case of applying the in-degree centrality index only to the users with the out-degree centrality above a certain threshold value(i.e. Trust CF - Conditional), the proposed system improved the accuracy a little (MAE = 0.564909) compared to traditional CF. However, the algorithm searching based on the trusted network of users (i.e. Trust CF - Search) was found to show the best performance (MAE = 0.564846). And the result from paired samples t-test presented that Trust CF - Search outperformed conventional CF with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of user's trust relationship network information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Traditional Landscape Architecture
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.1-11
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• 2015

This study sheds light on a pond design process which is a core facility of Hwaseol-dang in Muan, the Jeonnam. The plasticity of the pond was analyzed and interpreted for the design process using methods such as "literature search, interview, site visits, aerial pictures, aerial photographing, drawing figures of configuration plane via measurements, internet search, etc.", to trace the developing process of the design and the implications therein. The study results being centered on the developing process of the pond design are summarized herein below. The position of the Hwaseol-dang, being formed on a low hill having low competence as a place for a pavilion, draws more attention regarding its implications from the aspect of inner design. The pond Hwaseol-dang is in a rectangular shape of 1 : 1.2 ratio, in which the depth is a bit higher on the pond edge of the Hwaseol-dang thus being slanted, and Crape Myrtle, which is not known whether introduced during the formation of the pond, is cultivated on the island in the center widespread toward the southeast region. The planar design of the pond is interpreted as "rectangular pond" but it has a smooth half-moon shape where a part is excluded to remove edge. In particular, the three islands in rectangular pond, due to the narrow area, put one island and two half-moon-shaped islands in juxtaposition, and thus, although only being one island, resultantly exhibits the existence effect of proliferated three islands. This is allegedly due to the intentional formation aiming at the effect of hybrid while minimizing the overlap due to merging and adding from the aspect of constituting a design. Furthermore, the pond Hwaseol-dang is extended northwest along with Hwaseol-dang, and also the island in the center is thought to additionally have one or two, but the widespread phenomenon of the island in the center appears to consider the effect of "sit view on the floor of the pavilion of Hwaseol-dang". Considering that even a few examples of ponds having the three islands among the private house gardens in the nation are all curved ponds, the characteristics of the rectangular Hwaseol-dang pond establishing the garden effect of the three islands by modifying the one island in rectangular pond is highly notable. Considering that the three islands of "Yeongju, Bangjang, and Bongrae" is the original shape of the pond garden gestating Taoist ideology, as a symbolic design of a pond, it is regarded as the characteristics of the pond shape in Jeonnam area, and the so-called three treasures "Hwaseol-dang, Camellia, and oddly shaped stones, etc." are concentrated as the symbolism of Hwaseol-dang pond.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.125-137
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• 2018

Credit unions organized and operated by the members of communities, work-places or groups are co-operative entities where customers act as owners not just transaction partners. The foregoing organizational characteristic of credit unions exerts beneficial effects on their customer relationship, and underscores the need for diversifying their relationship marketing strategies. This study sheds light on the structural relationship of credit unions in terms of principal variables of relationship marketing, i.e. relationship benefits, customer satisfaction and long-term relationship orientation. Specifically, we classify the relationship benefits into three sub-dimensions, i.e. confidence benefits, social benefits and special treatment benefits, and structuralize a causal model involving the customer satisfaction and long-term relationship orientation. From December 26, 2017 to January 26, 2018, A total of 360 questionnaires was collected. Of these, 346 were selected as the final samples, excluding 14, which are difficult to use in statistics. The reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and regression analysis was performed by using the 'SPSS 24.0'. And confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation model analysis was performed by using 'AMOS 24.0'. The findings highlight the following. First, confidence benefits directly impact on the long-term relationship orientation, and indirectly influence the latter by the medium of customer satisfaction. Second, social benefits directly influence the long-term relationship orientation, without exerting any indirect effects on the latter via customer satisfaction. Third, special treatment benefits do not directly impact on the long-term relationship orientation but have indirect effects on the latter by the medium of customer satisfaction. Fourth, customer satisfaction has positive effects on the long-term relationship orientation. The findings suggest credit unions should establish a long-term relationship with their customers by providing them with confidence benefits to earn their trust and confidence, with social benefits to build a relationship of affinity and friendship, and with special treatment benefits to meet their needs in the long, not short and temporary, term.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.15-22
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• 2017

Streptococcus mutans (S. mutans), which plays a major role in the etiology of human dental caries, is able to tolerate exposure to acid shock in addition to its acidogenicity. We investigated the effects of pH stress on membrane fluidity, activities and expression levels of F-ATPase, and proton permeability in S. mutans. Using 1,6-diphenyl-1,3,5-hexatriene, we observed membrane ordering at pH 4.8 and pH 8.8. The ordering effects were larger at pH 4.8 in cytoplasmic membranes isolated from S. mutans (CMSM). Increasing pH resulted in a decrease in the activities and expression levels of F-ATPase. The proton permeability was decreased at both acidic and alkaline pHs, and the lowest permeability was observed at pH 4.8. The lower permeability at pH 8.8 than pH 6.8 is likely to be caused by the decreased proton influx due to the decreased CMSM fluidity. In addition, it seems to be evident that extremely low permeability at pH 4.8 was caused by the decreased proton influx due to the decreased CMSM fluidity as well as the increased proton efflux due to the increased activity and expression level of F-ATPase. It is likely that CMSM fluidity and F-ATPase activity are two major key factors that determine proton permeability in S. mutans. We suggest that CMSM fluidity plays an important role in the determination of proton permeability, which sheds light on the possibility of using nonspecific membrane fluidizers, e.g., ethanol, for anti-caries purposes.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.191-210
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• 2014

As mobile devices that can be connected to the Internet have spread and networking has become possible whenever/wherever, the Internet has become central in the dissemination and consumption of news. Accordingly, the ways news is gathered, disseminated, and consumed have changed greatly. In the traditional news media such as magazines and newspapers, expert editors determined what events were worthy of deploying their staffs or freelancers to cover and what stories from newswires or other sources would be printed. Furthermore, they determined how these stories would be displayed in their publications in terms of page placement, space allocation, type sizes, photographs, and other graphic elements. In turn, readers-news consumers-judged the importance of news not only by its subject and content, but also through subsidiary information such as its location and how it was displayed. Their judgments reflected their acceptance of an assumption that these expert editors had the knowledge and ability not only to serve as gatekeepers in determining what news was valuable and important but also how to rank its value and importance. As such, news assembled, dispensed, and consumed in this manner can be said to be expert-based recommended news. However, in the era of Internet news, the role of expert editors as gatekeepers has been greatly diminished. Many Internet news sites offer a huge volume of news on diverse topics from many media companies, thereby eliminating in many cases the gatekeeper role of expert editors. One result has been to turn news users from passive receptacles into activists who search for news that reflects their interests or tastes. To solve the problem of an overload of information and enhance the efficiency of news users' searches, Internet news sites have introduced numerous recommendation techniques. Recommendations based on popularity constitute one of the most frequently used of these techniques. This popularity-based approach shows a list of those news items that have been read and shared by many people, based on users' behavior such as clicks, evaluations, and sharing. "most-viewed list," "most-replied list," and "real-time issue" found on news sites belong to this system. Given that collective intelligence serves as the premise of these popularity-based recommendations, popularity-based news recommendations would be considered highly important because stories that have been read and shared by many people are presumably more likely to be better than those preferred by only a few people. However, these recommendations may reflect a popularity bias because stories judged likely to be more popular have been placed where they will be most noticeable. As a result, such stories are more likely to be continuously exposed and included in popularity-based recommended news lists. Popular news stories cannot be said to be necessarily those that are most important to readers. Given that many people use popularity-based recommended news and that the popularity-based recommendation approach greatly affects patterns of news use, a review of whether popularity-based news recommendations actually reflect important news can be said to be an indispensable procedure. Therefore, in this study, popularity-based news recommendations of an Internet news portal was compared with top placements of news in printed newspapers, and news users' judgments of which stories were personally and socially important were analyzed. The study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, content analyses were used to compare the content of the popularity-based news recommendations of an Internet news site with those of the expert-based news recommendations of printed newspapers. Five days of news stories were collected. "most-viewed list" of the Naver portal site were used as the popularity-based recommendations; the expert-based recommendations were represented by the top pieces of news from five major daily newspapers-the Chosun Ilbo, the JoongAng Ilbo, the Dong-A Daily News, the Hankyoreh Shinmun, and the Kyunghyang Shinmun. In the second stage, along with the news stories collected in the first stage, some Internet news stories and some news stories from printed newspapers that the Internet and the newspapers did not have in common were randomly extracted and used in online questionnaire surveys that asked the importance of these selected news stories. According to our analysis, only 10.81% of the popularity-based news recommendations were similar in content with the expert-based news judgments. Therefore, the content of popularity-based news recommendations appears to be quite different from the content of expert-based recommendations. The differences in importance between these two groups of news stories were analyzed, and the results indicated that whereas the two groups did not differ significantly in their recommendations of stories of personal importance, the expert-based recommendations ranked higher in social importance. This study has importance for theory in its examination of popularity-based news recommendations from the two theoretical viewpoints of collective intelligence and popularity bias and by its use of both qualitative (content analysis) and quantitative methods (questionnaires). It also sheds light on the differences in the role of media channels that fulfill an agenda-setting function and Internet news sites that treat news from the viewpoint of markets.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.95-109
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• 2013

The practices and processes of HRM (Human Resource Management) for university faculty in Korea depend heavily on assessment of research and teaching rather than the UIC (University-Industry Cooperation) performance. In this regard, HRM of Korean universities is said to be far distant from UIC. Although policy initiatives by the Korean government, notably the MoE (Ministry of Education) have implemented in most universities, the desirable level of UIC could not be achieved yet. Moreover, the very notion of 'university' in Korea is much more to do with 'pure' education and research institution than with 'applied' and 'vocational' purpose. Considering upon HRM practices and organizational culture, for enhancing UIC in Korea, the government's policy should be linked to alter deep-rooted university culture. So the aims of the research are to describe the current state of HRM in Korean and foreign universities; to find out the critical factors of UIC in Korean universities; to analyze the gaps between university research and industrial commercialization based on a conceptual framework, the 'valley of the death'; and to recommend HRM policies fostering UIC for the MoE. For achieving these objectives, we deploy multiple methodologies, namely, in-depth interview, literature survey, and statistical data analysis with regard to UIC. Analyzing the data we have collected, the present research sheds light on all aspects of HRM processes and UICs. And the main policy implication is restricted to the Korean universities, even if we have collected and analyzed foreign universities, notably universities in the USA. The research findings are mainly two folds. Firstly, the HRM practices among Korean universities are very similar due to the legally institutionalized framework and the government's regulations. Secondly, the difficulties of UIC can be explained by notion of the 'valley of death' ways in which both parties of university and industry are looking for different purposes and directions. In order to overcome the gap in the valley of death, the HRM policy is better to be considered as leverage. Finally, the policy recommendations are as follows. Firstly, various kinds of UIC programs are able to enhance the performances of not only UIC, but also education and research outcome. Secondly, fostering organizational climate and culture for UIC, employing various UIC programs, and hiring industry-experienced faculty are all very important for enhancing the high performance of university. We recommend the HRM policies fostering UIC by means of indirect way rather than funding directly for university. The HRM policy of indirect support is more likely to have long-term effectiveness while the government's direct intervention to UIC will have likely short-term effectiveness as the previous policy initiatives have shown. The MEST's policy means of indirect support might vary from financial incentives to the universities practicing HRM for UIC voluntarily, to information disclosure for UIC. The benefits of the present research can be found in suggesting HRM policy for UIC, highlighting the significance of industry-experienced faculty for UIC, and providing statistical analysis and evidences of UIC in Korean universities.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.49-67
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• 2015

Recently, emerging the notion of big data and social media has led us to enter data's big bang. Social networking services are widely used by people around the world, and they have become a part of major communication tools for all ages. Over the last decade, as online social networking sites become increasingly popular, companies tend to focus on advanced social media analysis for their marketing strategies. In addition to social media analysis, companies are mainly concerned about propagating of negative opinions on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as e-commerce sites. The effect of online word of mouth (WOM) such as product rating, product review, and product recommendations is very influential, and negative opinions have significant impact on product sales. This trend has increased researchers' attention to a natural language processing, such as a sentiment analysis. A sentiment analysis, also refers to as an opinion mining, is a process of identifying the polarity of subjective information and has been applied to various research and practical fields. However, there are obstacles lies when Korean language (Hangul) is used in a natural language processing because it is an agglutinative language with rich morphology pose problems. Therefore, there is a lack of Korean natural language processing resources such as a sentiment lexicon, and this has resulted in significant limitations for researchers and practitioners who are considering sentiment analysis. Our study builds a Korean sentiment lexicon with collective intelligence, and provides API (Application Programming Interface) service to open and share a sentiment lexicon data with the public (www.openhangul.com). For the pre-processing, we have created a Korean lexicon database with over 517,178 words and classified them into sentiment and non-sentiment words. In order to classify them, we first identified stop words which often quite likely to play a negative role in sentiment analysis and excluded them from our sentiment scoring. In general, sentiment words are nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs as they have sentimental expressions such as positive, neutral, and negative. On the other hands, non-sentiment words are interjection, determiner, numeral, postposition, etc. as they generally have no sentimental expressions. To build a reliable sentiment lexicon, we have adopted a concept of collective intelligence as a model for crowdsourcing. In addition, a concept of folksonomy has been implemented in the process of taxonomy to help collective intelligence. In order to make up for an inherent weakness of folksonomy, we have adopted a majority rule by building a voting system. Participants, as voters were offered three voting options to choose from positivity, negativity, and neutrality, and the voting have been conducted on one of the largest social networking sites for college students in Korea. More than 35,000 votes have been made by college students in Korea, and we keep this voting system open by maintaining the project as a perpetual study. Besides, any change in the sentiment score of words can be an important observation because it enables us to keep track of temporal changes in Korean language as a natural language. Lastly, our study offers a RESTful, JSON based API service through a web platform to make easier support for users such as researchers, companies, and developers. Finally, our study makes important contributions to both research and practice. In terms of research, our Korean sentiment lexicon plays an important role as a resource for Korean natural language processing. In terms of practice, practitioners such as managers and marketers can implement sentiment analysis effectively by using Korean sentiment lexicon we built. Moreover, our study sheds new light on the value of folksonomy by combining collective intelligence, and we also expect to give a new direction and a new start to the development of Korean natural language processing.