• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.91-108
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• 2020

Korea's famous soccer players are steadily performing well in international leagues, which led to higher interests of Korean fans in the international leagues. Reflecting the growing social phenomenon of rising interests on international leagues by Korean fans, the study examined the overall consumer perception in the consumption of uniform by domestic soccer fans and compared the changes in perception following the transfers of the players. Among others, the paper examined the consumer perception and purchase factors of soccer fans shown in social media, focusing on periods before and after the recruitment of Heung-Min Son to English Premier League's Tottenham Football Club. To this end, the EPL uniform is the collection keyword the paper utilized and collected consumer postings from domestic website and social media via Python 3.7, and analyzed them using Ucinet 6, NodeXL 1.0.1, and SPSS 25.0 programs. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, the uniform of the club that consistently topped the league, has been gaining attention as a popular uniform, and the players' performance, and the players' position have been identified as key factors in the purchase and search of professional football uniforms. In the case of the club, the actual ranking and whether the league won are shown to be important factors in the purchase and search of professional soccer uniforms. The club's emblem and the sponsor logo that will be attached to the uniform are also factors of interest to consumers. In addition, in the decision making process of purchase of a uniform by professional soccer fan, uniform's form, marking, authenticity, and sponsors are found to be more important than price, design, size, and logo. The official online store has emerged as a major purchasing channel, followed by gifts for friends or requests from acquaintances when someone travels to the United Kingdom. Second, a classification of key control categories through the convergence of iteration correlation analysis and Clauset-Newman-Moore clustering algorithm shows differences in the classification of individual groups, but groups that include the EPL's club and player keywords are identified as the key topics in relation to professional football uniforms. Third, between 2002 and 2006, the central theme for professional football uniforms was World Cup and English Premier League, but from 2012 to 2015, the focus has shifted to more interest of domestic and international players in the English Premier League. The subject has changed to the uniform itself from this time on. In this context, the paper can confirm that the major issues regarding the uniforms of professional soccer players have changed since Ji-Sung Park's transfer to Manchester United, and Sung-Yong Ki, Chung-Yong Lee, and Heung-Min Son's good performances in these leagues. The paper also identified that the uniforms of the clubs to which the players have transferred to are of interest. Fourth, both male and female consumers are showing increasing interest in Son's league, the English Premier League, which Tottenham FC belongs to. In particular, the increasing interest in Son has shown a tendency to increase interest in football uniforms for female consumers. This study presents a variety of researches on sports consumption and has value as a consumer study by identifying unique consumption patterns. It is meaningful in that the accuracy of the interpretation has been enhanced by using a cluster analysis via convergence of iteration correlation analysis and Clauset-Newman-Moore clustering algorithm to identify the main topics. Based on the results of this study, the clubs will be able to maximize its profits and maintain good relationships with fans by identifying key drivers of consumer awareness and purchasing for professional soccer fans and establishing an effective marketing strategy.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.1-25
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• 2020

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task that analyzes the sentiments consumers or the public feel about an arbitrary object from written texts. Furthermore, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained analysis of the sentiments towards each aspect of an object. Since having a more practical value in terms of business, ABSA is drawing attention from both academic and industrial organizations. When there is a review that says "The restaurant is expensive but the food is really fantastic", for example, the general SA evaluates the overall sentiment towards the 'restaurant' as 'positive', while ABSA identifies the restaurant's aspect 'price' as 'negative' and 'food' aspect as 'positive'. Thus, ABSA enables a more specific and effective marketing strategy. In order to perform ABSA, it is necessary to identify what are the aspect terms or aspect categories included in the text, and judge the sentiments towards them. Accordingly, there exist four main areas in ABSA; aspect term extraction, aspect category detection, Aspect Term Sentiment Classification (ATSC), and Aspect Category Sentiment Classification (ACSC). It is usually conducted by extracting aspect terms and then performing ATSC to analyze sentiments for the given aspect terms, or by extracting aspect categories and then performing ACSC to analyze sentiments for the given aspect category. Here, an aspect category is expressed in one or more aspect terms, or indirectly inferred by other words. In the preceding example sentence, 'price' and 'food' are both aspect categories, and the aspect category 'food' is expressed by the aspect term 'food' included in the review. If the review sentence includes 'pasta', 'steak', or 'grilled chicken special', these can all be aspect terms for the aspect category 'food'. As such, an aspect category referred to by one or more specific aspect terms is called an explicit aspect. On the other hand, the aspect category like 'price', which does not have any specific aspect terms but can be indirectly guessed with an emotional word 'expensive,' is called an implicit aspect. So far, the 'aspect category' has been used to avoid confusion about 'aspect term'. From now on, we will consider 'aspect category' and 'aspect' as the same concept and use the word 'aspect' more for convenience. And one thing to note is that ATSC analyzes the sentiment towards given aspect terms, so it deals only with explicit aspects, and ACSC treats not only explicit aspects but also implicit aspects. This study seeks to find answers to the following issues ignored in the previous studies when applying the BERT pre-trained language model to ACSC and derives superior ACSC models. First, is it more effective to reflect the output vector of tokens for aspect categories than to use only the final output vector of [CLS] token as a classification vector? Second, is there any performance difference between QA (Question Answering) and NLI (Natural Language Inference) types in the sentence-pair configuration of input data? Third, is there any performance difference according to the order of sentence including aspect category in the QA or NLI type sentence-pair configuration of input data? To achieve these research objectives, we implemented 12 ACSC models and conducted experiments on 4 English benchmark datasets. As a result, ACSC models that provide performance beyond the existing studies without expanding the training dataset were derived. In addition, it was found that it is more effective to reflect the output vector of the aspect category token than to use only the output vector for the [CLS] token as a classification vector. It was also found that QA type input generally provides better performance than NLI, and the order of the sentence with the aspect category in QA type is irrelevant with performance. There may be some differences depending on the characteristics of the dataset, but when using NLI type sentence-pair input, placing the sentence containing the aspect category second seems to provide better performance. The new methodology for designing the ACSC model used in this study could be similarly applied to other studies such as ATSC.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.227-252
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• 2018

The evolution of instant communication has mirrored the development of the Internet and messenger applications are among the most representative manifestations of instant communication technologies. In messenger applications, senders use emoticons to supplement the emotions conveyed in the text of their messages. The fact that communication via messenger applications is not face-to-face makes it difficult for senders to communicate their emotions to message recipients. Emoticons have long been used as symbols that indicate the moods of speakers. However, at present, emoticon-use is evolving into a means of conveying the psychological states of consumers who want to express individual characteristics and personality quirks while communicating their emotions to others. The fact that companies like KakaoTalk, Line, Apple, etc. have begun conducting emoticon business and sales of related content are expected to gradually increase testifies to the significance of this phenomenon. Nevertheless, despite the development of emoticons themselves and the growth of the emoticon market, no suitable emoticon recommendation system has yet been developed. Even KakaoTalk, a messenger application that commands more than 90% of domestic market share in South Korea, just grouped in to popularity, most recent, or brief category. This means consumers face the inconvenience of constantly scrolling around to locate the emoticons they want. The creation of an emoticon recommendation system would improve consumer convenience and satisfaction and increase the sales revenue of companies the sell emoticons. To recommend appropriate emoticons, it is necessary to quantify the emotions that the consumer sees and emotions. Such quantification will enable us to analyze the characteristics and emotions felt by consumers who used similar emoticons, which, in turn, will facilitate our emoticon recommendations for consumers. One way to quantify emoticons use is metadata-ization. Metadata-ization is a means of structuring or organizing unstructured and semi-structured data to extract meaning. By structuring unstructured emoticon data through metadata-ization, we can easily classify emoticons based on the emotions consumers want to express. To determine emoticons' precise emotions, we had to consider sub-detail expressions-not only the seven common emotional adjectives but also the metaphorical expressions that appear only in South Korean proved by previous studies related to emotion focusing on the emoticon's characteristics. We therefore collected the sub-detail expressions of emotion based on the "Shape", "Color" and "Adumbration". Moreover, to design a highly accurate recommendation system, we considered both emotion-technical indexes and emoticon-emotional indexes. We then identified 14 features of emoticon-technical indexes and selected 36 emotional adjectives. The 36 emotional adjectives consisted of contrasting adjectives, which we reduced to 18, and we measured the 18 emotional adjectives using 40 emoticon sets randomly selected from the top-ranked emoticons in the KakaoTalk shop. We surveyed 277 consumers in their mid-twenties who had experience purchasing emoticons; we recruited them online and asked them to evaluate five different emoticon sets. After data acquisition, we conducted a factor analysis of emoticon-emotional factors. We extracted four factors that we named "Comic", Softness", "Modernity" and "Transparency". We analyzed both the relationship between indexes and consumer attitude and the relationship between emoticon-technical indexes and emoticon-emotional factors. Through this process, we confirmed that the emoticon-technical indexes did not directly affect consumer attitudes but had a mediating effect on consumer attitudes through emoticon-emotional factors. The results of the analysis revealed the mechanism consumers use to evaluate emoticons; the results also showed that consumers' emoticon-technical indexes affected emoticon-emotional factors and that the emoticon-emotional factors affected consumer satisfaction. We therefore designed the emoticon recommendation system using only four emoticon-emotional factors; we created a recommendation method to calculate the Euclidean distance from each factors' emotion. In an attempt to increase the accuracy of the emoticon recommendation system, we compared the emotional patterns of selected emoticons with the recommended emoticons. The emotional patterns corresponded in principle. We verified the emoticon recommendation system by testing prediction accuracy; the predictions were 81.02% accurate in the first result, 76.64% accurate in the second, and 81.63% accurate in the third. This study developed a methodology that can be used in various fields academically and practically. We expect that the novel emoticon recommendation system we designed will increase emoticon sales for companies who conduct business in this domain and make consumer experiences more convenient. In addition, this study served as an important first step in the development of an intelligent emoticon recommendation system. The emotional factors proposed in this study could be collected in an emotional library that could serve as an emotion index for evaluation when new emoticons are released. Moreover, by combining the accumulated emotional library with company sales data, sales information, and consumer data, companies could develop hybrid recommendation systems that would bolster convenience for consumers and serve as intellectual assets that companies could strategically deploy.