• Title/Summary/Keyword: Structured Methods

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Life Experience of People Living with HIV/AIDS: rising up from despair (HIV/AIDS 감염인의 감염 이후 삶의 긍정적 경험 : "추락하는 것에는 날개가 있다")

  • Kim, Kyung Mee;Kim, Min-Jung
    • Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies
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    • v.41 no.1
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    • pp.251-279
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    • 2010
  • In 2009 the Ministry of Health and Society reported a new milestone in longevity among people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA): An individual was reported to be living and healthy after 24 years with HIV/AIDS. Today, PLWHA who receive treatment are more likely to die as a result of cancer or cardiovascular diseases than HIV/AIDS. However, in Korea the public association between HIV/AIDS and death remains strong and PLWHA live with the feeling of being discarded. While great advances have been made in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, understanding of life with HIV/AIDS is just beginning. This study describes the life experiences of PLWHA after being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Phenomenological methods were used to analyze the transcripts of semi-structured interviews with six PLWHA. Time is a constant factor in the life experiences of PLWHA. After being diagnosed, participants were shocked, feeling as though the world was caving in and they were living with a time bomb. Compulsory disclosure left PLWHA with a feeling of disconnection from the world. Participants were fired from their jobs, resulting in poverty, isolation and a sense that they were simply waiting to die. However, health professionals informed participants that HIV/AIDS is a manageable illness. With time, PLWHA came to understand HIV/AIDS differently. In accepting their HIV infection, PLWHA created a new sense of meaning in their lives. To be honest to their loved ones and true to their own identity, PLWHA worked to "come out." The experience of coming out helped them to accept themselves as they were and understand their own strength. The most important influence on their treatment, and living with HIV/AIDS generally, was obtaining correct information about HIV/AIDS from health professionals. After accepting that they were living with HIV/AIDS, participants were able to look beyond themselves to support those around them, including family members, friends, and others who encouraged them to recognize and feel confident in their own identity.

The Melodic Structure of Sangnyeongsan in Gwanak-yeongsanhoesang - Focused on the Relationship between Piri Melody and Daegeum yeoneum - (관악영산회상 중 상령산의 선율 구조 - 피리 선율과 대금 연음의 관계를 중심으로 -)

  • Yim, Hyun-Taek
    • (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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    • no.39
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    • pp.701-748
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    • 2019
  • Gwanak-yeongsanhoesang, called as Samhyeon-yeongsanhoesang or Pyojeongmanbangjigok, is played by the musical instrumental organization, Samhyeonyukgak or by a large scale wind ensemble added Sogeum and Ajaeng. This study aims to analyze the structure and form of Piri melody which plays major melody of Sangnyeongsan in Gwanak-yeongsanhoesang, and to examine the relationship between Piri melody and Daegeum yeoneum grasping the structure and function of yeoneum. In Sangnyeongsan of Gwanak-yeongsanhoesang, the criterion for grouping the phrases of Piri melody is yeoneum. Especially, Daegeum yeoneum carries out the function of finishing the phrase of Piri playing the major melody by ornamenting or extending it, and presenting the motives or motive elements of the next phrase while Piri rests. The types of a, b, g, and i in the various shapes of the minimum melodic fragment of Piri are important motive elements that constitute a phrase of Piri melody. Especially, main motive a-type (仲→無) contrasts with b type (林→潢) which forms a strong tension by transposing 2 degrees upward. In addition, a-type gradually descends towards the end of music by changing to g-type (仲→林) or to i-type (太→林) which is 3 degrees below, which is related to the gradual descent cadence of Korean traditional music. A phrase of Piri melody of Sangnyeongsan in Gwanak-yeongsanhoesang consists of a combination of the types a, b, g, i, and cadence (x-type), and each phrase is structured in the repeating tension-relaxation. Looking at the structure of Piri phrases by similar types, each phrase has a logical variation structure through the methods such as omission and addition of notes, and crossing of melodies. The shape of the minimum melodic fragment of Daegeum yeoneum can be divided into a back-yeoneum of a~b types and a front-yeoneum of x1~x3. The x-types ornament Jungnyeo (仲), the cadence tone of Piri melody or are simply used as the extending back-yeoneum, and types a and b have the function of a front-yeoneum that prepares the beginning of the next phrase of Piri melody. The combination types of the minimum melodic fragment of Daegeum yeoneum appear mostly as the shape of back-yeoneum + front-yeoneum. In addition, the front-yeoneum of the type a and b appears independently without back-yeoneum, and the x3 type has a shape of the back-yeoneum without the front-yeoneum. Looking at the structure of Daegeum yeoneum by similar types, it can be seen that Daegeum yeoneum is also composed of a variation structure of omission and addition of notes like Piri melody.

Effects of Polar Literacy Education Program for Elementary and Middle School Students (초·중학생 대상 극지 소양 교육 프로그램의 효과)

  • Sueim Chung;Donghee Shin
    • Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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    • v.43 no.3
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    • pp.209-223
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    • 2023
  • This study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a polar literacy education program for elementary and middle school students, and to derive implications for new education to respond to climate change. We developed modular education programs based on the seven principles of polar literacy established by the Polar-ICE team. We divided them into two courses, one emphasizing science concepts and another emphasizing humanities and sociological issues. We then selected and structured detailed programs suitable for the two courses. These two courses were applied to 26 elementary and middle school students for approximately 69 hours in a Saturday science class hosted by the Department of Science Education at a university in Seoul. The 26 students were divided into three groups. Two groups completed the science education program for polar literacy and a humanities and social studies education program for polar literacy, respectively. The third group, the control group, received general science education unrelated to polar literacy. Before and after running the programs, all three groups responded to a polar literacy test and questionnaires that used vocabulary and presented scenes associated with polar regions. The test results were expressed using Wilcoxon signed ranks, which is a non-parametric test method, and improvements made upon completion of the program were analyzed. From a cognitive aspect, all three groups showed improvement after completing the program in the knowledge area; however, the experimental groups showed a greater degree of improvement than the control group, and there was a clear difference in the contents or materials explicitly covered. From an affective aspect, the difference between before and after the program was minor, but the group that focused on humanities and social issues showed a statistically significant improvement. Regarding changes in polar imagery, the two experimental groups tended to diverge from monotonous images to more diverse images compared to the control group. Based on the above results, we suggested methods to increase the effectiveness of polar literacy education programs, the importance of polar literacy as appropriate material for scientific thinking and earth system education, measures to improve attitudes related to the polar region, and the need to link to school curriculums.

An Analytical Approach Using Topic Mining for Improving the Service Quality of Hotels (호텔 산업의 서비스 품질 향상을 위한 토픽 마이닝 기반 분석 방법)

  • Moon, Hyun Sil;Sung, David;Kim, Jae Kyeong
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.25 no.1
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    • pp.21-41
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    • 2019
  • Thanks to the rapid development of information technologies, the data available on Internet have grown rapidly. In this era of big data, many studies have attempted to offer insights and express the effects of data analysis. In the tourism and hospitality industry, many firms and studies in the era of big data have paid attention to online reviews on social media because of their large influence over customers. As tourism is an information-intensive industry, the effect of these information networks on social media platforms is more remarkable compared to any other types of media. However, there are some limitations to the improvements in service quality that can be made based on opinions on social media platforms. Users on social media platforms represent their opinions as text, images, and so on. Raw data sets from these reviews are unstructured. Moreover, these data sets are too big to extract new information and hidden knowledge by human competences. To use them for business intelligence and analytics applications, proper big data techniques like Natural Language Processing and data mining techniques are needed. This study suggests an analytical approach to directly yield insights from these reviews to improve the service quality of hotels. Our proposed approach consists of topic mining to extract topics contained in the reviews and the decision tree modeling to explain the relationship between topics and ratings. Topic mining refers to a method for finding a group of words from a collection of documents that represents a document. Among several topic mining methods, we adopted the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm, which is considered as the most universal algorithm. However, LDA is not enough to find insights that can improve service quality because it cannot find the relationship between topics and ratings. To overcome this limitation, we also use the Classification and Regression Tree method, which is a kind of decision tree technique. Through the CART method, we can find what topics are related to positive or negative ratings of a hotel and visualize the results. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the representation of an analytical approach for the improvement of hotel service quality from unstructured review data sets. Through experiments for four hotels in Hong Kong, we can find the strengths and weaknesses of services for each hotel and suggest improvements to aid in customer satisfaction. Especially from positive reviews, we find what these hotels should maintain for service quality. For example, compared with the other hotels, a hotel has a good location and room condition which are extracted from positive reviews for it. In contrast, we also find what they should modify in their services from negative reviews. For example, a hotel should improve room condition related to soundproof. These results mean that our approach is useful in finding some insights for the service quality of hotels. That is, from the enormous size of review data, our approach can provide practical suggestions for hotel managers to improve their service quality. In the past, studies for improving service quality relied on surveys or interviews of customers. However, these methods are often costly and time consuming and the results may be biased by biased sampling or untrustworthy answers. The proposed approach directly obtains honest feedback from customers' online reviews and draws some insights through a type of big data analysis. So it will be a more useful tool to overcome the limitations of surveys or interviews. Moreover, our approach easily obtains the service quality information of other hotels or services in the tourism industry because it needs only open online reviews and ratings as input data. Furthermore, the performance of our approach will be better if other structured and unstructured data sources are added.

Clickstream Big Data Mining for Demographics based Digital Marketing (인구통계특성 기반 디지털 마케팅을 위한 클릭스트림 빅데이터 마이닝)

  • Park, Jiae;Cho, Yoonho
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.22 no.3
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    • pp.143-163
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    • 2016
  • The demographics of Internet users are the most basic and important sources for target marketing or personalized advertisements on the digital marketing channels which include email, mobile, and social media. However, it gradually has become difficult to collect the demographics of Internet users because their activities are anonymous in many cases. Although the marketing department is able to get the demographics using online or offline surveys, these approaches are very expensive, long processes, and likely to include false statements. Clickstream data is the recording an Internet user leaves behind while visiting websites. As the user clicks anywhere in the webpage, the activity is logged in semi-structured website log files. Such data allows us to see what pages users visited, how long they stayed there, how often they visited, when they usually visited, which site they prefer, what keywords they used to find the site, whether they purchased any, and so forth. For such a reason, some researchers tried to guess the demographics of Internet users by using their clickstream data. They derived various independent variables likely to be correlated to the demographics. The variables include search keyword, frequency and intensity for time, day and month, variety of websites visited, text information for web pages visited, etc. The demographic attributes to predict are also diverse according to the paper, and cover gender, age, job, location, income, education, marital status, presence of children. A variety of data mining methods, such as LSA, SVM, decision tree, neural network, logistic regression, and k-nearest neighbors, were used for prediction model building. However, this research has not yet identified which data mining method is appropriate to predict each demographic variable. Moreover, it is required to review independent variables studied so far and combine them as needed, and evaluate them for building the best prediction model. The objective of this study is to choose clickstream attributes mostly likely to be correlated to the demographics from the results of previous research, and then to identify which data mining method is fitting to predict each demographic attribute. Among the demographic attributes, this paper focus on predicting gender, age, marital status, residence, and job. And from the results of previous research, 64 clickstream attributes are applied to predict the demographic attributes. The overall process of predictive model building is compose of 4 steps. In the first step, we create user profiles which include 64 clickstream attributes and 5 demographic attributes. The second step performs the dimension reduction of clickstream variables to solve the curse of dimensionality and overfitting problem. We utilize three approaches which are based on decision tree, PCA, and cluster analysis. We build alternative predictive models for each demographic variable in the third step. SVM, neural network, and logistic regression are used for modeling. The last step evaluates the alternative models in view of model accuracy and selects the best model. For the experiments, we used clickstream data which represents 5 demographics and 16,962,705 online activities for 5,000 Internet users. IBM SPSS Modeler 17.0 was used for our prediction process, and the 5-fold cross validation was conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. As the experimental results, we can verify that there are a specific data mining method well-suited for each demographic variable. For example, age prediction is best performed when using the decision tree based dimension reduction and neural network whereas the prediction of gender and marital status is the most accurate by applying SVM without dimension reduction. We conclude that the online behaviors of the Internet users, captured from the clickstream data analysis, could be well used to predict their demographics, thereby being utilized to the digital marketing.

Feasibility of Deep Learning Algorithms for Binary Classification Problems (이진 분류문제에서의 딥러닝 알고리즘의 활용 가능성 평가)

  • Kim, Kitae;Lee, Bomi;Kim, Jong Woo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.23 no.1
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    • pp.95-108
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    • 2017
  • Recently, AlphaGo which is Bakuk (Go) artificial intelligence program by Google DeepMind, had a huge victory against Lee Sedol. Many people thought that machines would not be able to win a man in Go games because the number of paths to make a one move is more than the number of atoms in the universe unlike chess, but the result was the opposite to what people predicted. After the match, artificial intelligence technology was focused as a core technology of the fourth industrial revolution and attracted attentions from various application domains. Especially, deep learning technique have been attracted as a core artificial intelligence technology used in the AlphaGo algorithm. The deep learning technique is already being applied to many problems. Especially, it shows good performance in image recognition field. In addition, it shows good performance in high dimensional data area such as voice, image and natural language, which was difficult to get good performance using existing machine learning techniques. However, in contrast, it is difficult to find deep leaning researches on traditional business data and structured data analysis. In this study, we tried to find out whether the deep learning techniques have been studied so far can be used not only for the recognition of high dimensional data but also for the binary classification problem of traditional business data analysis such as customer churn analysis, marketing response prediction, and default prediction. And we compare the performance of the deep learning techniques with that of traditional artificial neural network models. The experimental data in the paper is the telemarketing response data of a bank in Portugal. It has input variables such as age, occupation, loan status, and the number of previous telemarketing and has a binary target variable that records whether the customer intends to open an account or not. In this study, to evaluate the possibility of utilization of deep learning algorithms and techniques in binary classification problem, we compared the performance of various models using CNN, LSTM algorithm and dropout, which are widely used algorithms and techniques in deep learning, with that of MLP models which is a traditional artificial neural network model. However, since all the network design alternatives can not be tested due to the nature of the artificial neural network, the experiment was conducted based on restricted settings on the number of hidden layers, the number of neurons in the hidden layer, the number of output data (filters), and the application conditions of the dropout technique. The F1 Score was used to evaluate the performance of models to show how well the models work to classify the interesting class instead of the overall accuracy. The detail methods for applying each deep learning technique in the experiment is as follows. The CNN algorithm is a method that reads adjacent values from a specific value and recognizes the features, but it does not matter how close the distance of each business data field is because each field is usually independent. In this experiment, we set the filter size of the CNN algorithm as the number of fields to learn the whole characteristics of the data at once, and added a hidden layer to make decision based on the additional features. For the model having two LSTM layers, the input direction of the second layer is put in reversed position with first layer in order to reduce the influence from the position of each field. In the case of the dropout technique, we set the neurons to disappear with a probability of 0.5 for each hidden layer. The experimental results show that the predicted model with the highest F1 score was the CNN model using the dropout technique, and the next best model was the MLP model with two hidden layers using the dropout technique. In this study, we were able to get some findings as the experiment had proceeded. First, models using dropout techniques have a slightly more conservative prediction than those without dropout techniques, and it generally shows better performance in classification. Second, CNN models show better classification performance than MLP models. This is interesting because it has shown good performance in binary classification problems which it rarely have been applied to, as well as in the fields where it's effectiveness has been proven. Third, the LSTM algorithm seems to be unsuitable for binary classification problems because the training time is too long compared to the performance improvement. From these results, we can confirm that some of the deep learning algorithms can be applied to solve business binary classification problems.

Quality of Life and Its Related Factors of Radiation Therapy Cancer Patients (방사선 치료를 받은 암환자의 삶의 질과 관련요인)

  • Shin, Ryung-Mi;Jung, Won-Seok;Oh, Byeong-Cheon;Jo, Jun-Young;Kim, Gi-Chul;Choi, Tae-Gyu;Lee, Sok-Goo
    • The Journal of Korean Society for Radiation Therapy
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    • v.23 no.1
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    • pp.21-29
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    • 2011
  • Purpose: The purpose of this master's thesis is to utilize basic data in order to improve the quality of life of cancer patients who received radiation therapy after analysing related factors that influence patient's quality of life and obtaining information about physical, mental problems of patients. Materials and Methods: By using a structured questionnaire about various characteristics and forms of support, I carried out a survey targeting 107 patients that experienced radiation therapy at a university hospital in the Daejeon metropolitan area from July 15 to August 15, 2010 and analysed the factors influencing quality of life. Results: In case of pain due to disease, 65.15 and painless 81.87 showed a high grade quality of life. As body weight decreases, the quality of life become lower. When the grade of quality of life according to economic characteristics was compared, all items except treatment period showed a difference (P=0.000). When the score of social support, family support, medical support and self-esteem was low, the mark of quality of life showed respectively 61.71, 68.77, 71.31, and 69.39 on the basis of 128 points. When the score of support form was high, the mark of quality of life showed 90.47, 83.29, 90.40, and 90.36 (P<0.05). When analyzing the correlation between social support, family support, medical support and self-esteem and the degree of quality of life, social support was 0.768, family support 0.596, medical support 0.434, self-esteem 0.516. They indicated the correlation of meaningful quantity statistically (P<0.01). The factors that improved the quality of life were married state, having a job and painless status. As monthly income increases, the quality of life was also much improved (P<0.05). Among the factors related to quality of life, social support and medical support and higher self-esteem scores of the quality of life score increased 0.979 point, 0.508 points and 1.667 point, respectively. Conclusion: In conclusion, the quality of life of cancer patients that received radiation treatment is related to social support, medical support and self esteem. Self-esteem is an important factor that influenced quality of life, so if government offers works that doesn't affect patient's health, they are a useful method that maximize self-esteem and lessen their financial burden at the same time. Along with these policies, the developments of the attention of medical and the program for cancer patient's family are needed for the purpose of improving quality of life of cancer patients. Lastly, medical team, patients and family have to cooperate in harmony to overcome difficulties of cancer patients.

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Customer perception and expert assessment in restaurant food environment by region - Focused on restaurants in Suwon, Hwaseong city - (도시와 농촌의 한식 음식점 식생활 환경에 대한 고객 인식 및 전문가 평가 비교 - 수원, 화성지역 음식점을 중심으로 -)

  • Oh, Mi Hyun;Choe, Jeong-Sook;Kim, Young;Lee, Sang Eun;Paik, Hee Young;Jang, Mi Jin
    • Journal of Nutrition and Health
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    • v.47 no.6
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    • pp.463-474
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    • 2014
  • Purpose: The aim of this study was to assess the food environment, particularly focusing on restaurants in three areas (Suwon city, Hwaseong Byeongieom-dong, and Bibong-myun). Methods: A total of 662 persons were surveyed on customers' perceptions of the food environment in restaurants. A structured questionnaire composed of 30 questions on 7 factors, sanitation (4 items), displaying information (5), food quality (12), information on nutritional and healthy food choice (6), restaurant's accessibility (1), availability (1), and affordability (1) was used. In addition, an expert assessment of restaurant sanitation, and information on nutritional healthy food choice was conducted through visiting 126 restaurants. Results: Scores (range of score : 1~7) for each factors assessing the restaurant food environment were 5.06 for sanitation factors, 5.05 for displaying information factors, 5.13 for taste appearance factors, and 4.35 for healthy menu factors. Informations on nutritional healthy food choice showed a low rate: only 16.24% of the subjects answered that there is a message encouraging choice of healthy foods and 27.4% answered that menus contain nutritional information. Significant differences in food environment were observed by region (city, town, rural). The restaurants food environment in the rural area turned out to be poorer than that of the other two areas. In comparison of customer perception and expert assessment, significant differences were observed for 'Employee appearances and uniforms are clean and tidy' (p < .05), and 'There is a message encouraging the choice of healthy foods' (p < .05). Conclusion: This study provided evidence for differences of restaurant food environment by regions. In the rural area, there is a problem in restaurant's accessibility, availability, and affordability because of a lack of variety in menu items and restaurants. This results suggest that there is a need for more healthy food restaurants in the rural area.

A study on the classification of research topics based on COVID-19 academic research using Topic modeling (토픽모델링을 활용한 COVID-19 학술 연구 기반 연구 주제 분류에 관한 연구)

  • Yoo, So-yeon;Lim, Gyoo-gun
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.28 no.1
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    • pp.155-174
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    • 2022
  • From January 2020 to October 2021, more than 500,000 academic studies related to COVID-19 (Coronavirus-2, a fatal respiratory syndrome) have been published. The rapid increase in the number of papers related to COVID-19 is putting time and technical constraints on healthcare professionals and policy makers to quickly find important research. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method of extracting useful information from text data of extensive literature using LDA and Word2vec algorithm. Papers related to keywords to be searched were extracted from papers related to COVID-19, and detailed topics were identified. The data used the CORD-19 data set on Kaggle, a free academic resource prepared by major research groups and the White House to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, updated weekly. The research methods are divided into two main categories. First, 41,062 articles were collected through data filtering and pre-processing of the abstracts of 47,110 academic papers including full text. For this purpose, the number of publications related to COVID-19 by year was analyzed through exploratory data analysis using a Python program, and the top 10 journals under active research were identified. LDA and Word2vec algorithm were used to derive research topics related to COVID-19, and after analyzing related words, similarity was measured. Second, papers containing 'vaccine' and 'treatment' were extracted from among the topics derived from all papers, and a total of 4,555 papers related to 'vaccine' and 5,971 papers related to 'treatment' were extracted. did For each collected paper, detailed topics were analyzed using LDA and Word2vec algorithms, and a clustering method through PCA dimension reduction was applied to visualize groups of papers with similar themes using the t-SNE algorithm. A noteworthy point from the results of this study is that the topics that were not derived from the topics derived for all papers being researched in relation to COVID-19 (

    ) were the topic modeling results for each research topic (
    ) was found to be derived from For example, as a result of topic modeling for papers related to 'vaccine', a new topic titled Topic 05 'neutralizing antibodies' was extracted. A neutralizing antibody is an antibody that protects cells from infection when a virus enters the body, and is said to play an important role in the production of therapeutic agents and vaccine development. In addition, as a result of extracting topics from papers related to 'treatment', a new topic called Topic 05 'cytokine' was discovered. A cytokine storm is when the immune cells of our body do not defend against attacks, but attack normal cells. Hidden topics that could not be found for the entire thesis were classified according to keywords, and topic modeling was performed to find detailed topics. In this study, we proposed a method of extracting topics from a large amount of literature using the LDA algorithm and extracting similar words using the Skip-gram method that predicts the similar words as the central word among the Word2vec models. The combination of the LDA model and the Word2vec model tried to show better performance by identifying the relationship between the document and the LDA subject and the relationship between the Word2vec document. In addition, as a clustering method through PCA dimension reduction, a method for intuitively classifying documents by using the t-SNE technique to classify documents with similar themes and forming groups into a structured organization of documents was presented. In a situation where the efforts of many researchers to overcome COVID-19 cannot keep up with the rapid publication of academic papers related to COVID-19, it will reduce the precious time and effort of healthcare professionals and policy makers, and rapidly gain new insights. We hope to help you get It is also expected to be used as basic data for researchers to explore new research directions.

  • The Impacts of Social Support and Psychological Factors on Guild Members' Flow and Loyalty in MMORPG (MMORPG에서 길드 구성원들의 사회적 지지와 심리적 요인들이 플로우 및 충성도에 미치는 영향)

    • Kang, Ju-Seon;Ko, Yoon-Jung;Ko, Il-Sang
      • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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      • v.19 no.3
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      • pp.69-98
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      • 2009
    • We investigated what factors motivate gamers to participate in a guild and why they continue to be engaged as members of the guild. We find that, based on the result of focus group interviews with MMORPG gamers, social support and self-esteem factors play important roles. Considering both prior research and the focus group interviews we have conducted, we define social support and character control as independent variables. Character identity, guild identity, and self-esteem are proposed as mediating variables while guild flow and game loyalty as dependent variables. Accordingly, we develop the research model and hypotheses, and verify them empirically. Based on our experiences of playing the WoW game, we proposed a research model and conducted focus-group interviews (FGIs). FGIs involve formulating a hypothesis and then collecting some relevant data. FGIs were conducted face-to-face with students of C University in Korea. We formulated structured interview schedules, and the questions were based on our research variables and personal experiences. The questions for the interviews encompassed the following areas: (a) the demographic characteristics of the focus group; (b) the number of years for which respondents had played online games; (c) the motive for starting a game; (d) the number of game-characters assumed by each gamer; (e) the type of game played; and (f) other issues such as the reasons for involvement in the play, the willingness to reuse the game in case new versions were released, etc. On average, it took two hours to interview each of three groups. A primary set of FGIs was conducted with three groups on the premise that there would be some differences caused by character race (Horde vs. Alliance) or by playable server (Normal vs. Combat). With respect to the manner of playing, we found that guild members shared information, felt a sense of belonging, and played computer games for quite a long time through the guild; however, they did not undergo these experiences when playing alone. Gamers who belonged to a specific guild helped other players without expecting compensation for that, freely shared information about the game, gave away items for free, and more generous with other members who made mistakes. The guild members were aware of the existence other members and experienced a sense of belonging through interactions with, and evaluations from, other players. It was clear that social support was shown within the guild and that it played an important role as a major research variable. Based on the results of the first FGIs, a second set of in-depth FGIs was carried out with a focus on the psychology of the individual within the guild and the social community of the guild. The second set of FGIs also focused on the guild's offline meetings. Gamers, over all, recognize the necessity of joining a community, not only off-line but also online world of the guild. They admit that the guild is important for them to easily and conveniently enjoy playing online computer games. The active behavior and positive attitudes of existing guild members can motivate new members of the guild to adapt themselves to the guild environment. They then adopt the same behaviors and attitudes of established guild members. In this manner, the new members of the guild strengthen the bonds with other gamers while feeling a sense of belonging, and developing social identity, thereby. It was discovered that the interaction among guild members and the social support encouraged new gamers to quickly develop a sense of social identity and increase their self-esteem. The guild seemed to play the role of socializing gamers. Sometimes, even in the real world, the guild members helped one another; therefore, the features of the guild also spilled over to the offline environment. We intend to use self-esteem, which was found through the second set of FGIs, as an important research variable. To collect data, an online survey was designed with a questionnaire to be completed by WoW gamers, who belong to a guild. The survey was registered on the best three domestic game-sites: 'WoW playforum,' 'WoW gamemeca,' and 'Wow invent.' The selected items to be measured in the questionnaire were decided based on prior research and data from FGIs. To verify the content of the questionnaire, we carried out a pilot test with the same participants to point out ambiguous questions as a way to ensure maximum accuracy of the survey result. A total of 244 responses were analyzed from the 250 completed questionnaires. The SEM analysis was used to test goodness-of-fit of the model. As a result, we found important results as follows: First, according to the statistics, social support had statistically significant impacts on character control, character identity, guild identity and self-esteem. Second, character control had significant effects on character identity, guild identity and self-esteem. Third, character identity shows its clear impact on self-esteem and game loyalty. Fourth, guild identity affected self-esteem, guild flow and game loyalty. Fifth, self-esteem had a positive influence on the guild flow. These days, the number of virtual community is rising along with its significance largely because of the nature of the online games. Accordingly, this study is designed to clarify the psychological relationship between gamers within the guild that has been generally established by gamers to play online games together. This study focuses on the relationships in which social support influences guild flow or game loyalty through character control, character identity, guild identity, and self-esteem, which are present within a guild in the MMORPG game environment. The study results are as follows. First, the effects of social support on character control, character identity, guild identity and self-esteem are proven to be statistically significant. It was found that character control improves character identity, guild identity and self-esteem. Among the seven variables, social support, which is derived from FGIs, plays an important role in this study. With the active support of other guild members, gamers can improve their ability to develop good characters and to control them. Second, character identity has a positive effect on self-esteem and game loyalty, while guild identity has a significant effect on self-esteem, guild flow and game loyalty. Self-esteem affects guild flow. It was found that the higher the character and guild identities become, the greater the self-esteem is established. Contrary to the findings of prior research, our study results indicate that the relationship between character identity and guild flow is not significant. Rather, it was found that character identity directly affects game players' loyalty. Even though the character identity had no direct effect on increasing guild flow, it has indirectly affected guild flow through self-esteem. The significant relationship between self-esteem and guild flow indicates that gamers achieve flow, i.e., a feeling of pleasure and excitement through social support. Several important implications of this study should be noted. First, both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to conduct this study. Through FGIs, it was observed that both social support and self-esteem are important variables. Second, because guilds had been rarely studied, this research is expected to play an important role in the online community. Third, according to the result, six hypotheses (H1, H5, H6, H7, H8, and H11) setup based on FGIs, were statistically significant; thus, we can suggest the corresponding relationships among the variables as a guideline for follow-up research. Our research is significant as it has following implications: first, the social support of the guild members is important when establishing character control, character identity, guildidentity and self-esteem. It is also a major variable that affects guild flow and game loyalty. Second, character control when improved by social support shows notable influence on the development of character identity, guild identity and self-esteem. Third, character identity and guild identity are major factors to help establish gamers' own self-esteem. Fourth, character identity affects guild flow through self-esteem and game loyalty. The gamers usually express themselves through characters; the higher character identity is, the more loyalty a gamer has. Fifth, guild identity, established within the guild, has clear effects on self-esteem, guild flow and game loyalty. Sixth, qualitative and quantitative methods are employed to conduct this study. Based on the results of focus group interviews and SEM analysis, we find that the social support by guild members and psychological factors are significant in strengthening the flow of guild and loyalty to the game. As such, game developers should provide some extra functions for guild community, through which gamers can play online games in collaboration with one another. Also, we suggest that positive self-esteem which is built up through social support can help gamers achieve higher level of flow and satisfaction, which will consequently contribute to minimizing the possibility for the players to develop negative attitude toward the guild they belong to.