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The Effect of Daily Minimum Temperature of the Period from Dormancy Breaking to First Bloom on Apple Phenology (휴면타파부터 개화개시까지의 일 최저온도가 사과 생물계절에 미치는 영향)

  • Kyung-Bong Namkung;Sung-Chul Yun
    • Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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    • v.25 no.3
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    • pp.208-217
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    • 2023
  • Accurate estimation of dormancy breaking and first bloom dates is crucial for effective fire blight control by disease model such as Maryblyt in apple orchards. The duration from dormancy breaking to first bloom in apple trees was influenced by daily minimum temperatures during the dormant period. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between minimum temperatures during this period and the time taken for flowering to commence. Webcam data from eight apple orchards, equipped by the National Institute of Horticultural and Herbal Science, were observed from 2019 to 2023 to determine the dates of starting bloom (B1). Additionally, the dormancy breaking dates for these eight sites were estimated using an apple chill day model, with a value of -100.5 DD, based on collected weather data. Two regressions were performed to analyze the relationships: the first regression between the number of days under 0℃ (X1) and the time from calculated dormancy breaking to observed first bloom (Y), resulting in Y = 0.87 × X1 + 40.76 with R2 = 0.84. The second regression examined the starting date of breaking dormancy (X2) and the duration from dormancy breaking to observed first bloom (Y), resulting in Y = -1.07 × X2 + 143.62 with R2 = 0.92. These findings suggest that apple anti-chill days are significantly affected by minimum temperatures during the period from dormancy breaking to flowering, indicating their importance in fire blight control measures.

${\delta}^{13}C$ Evidence for the Importance of Local Benthic Producers to Fish Nutrition in the Inner Bay Systems in the Southern Coast of Korea (${\delta}^{13}C$ 분석에 의한 남해 연안 내만역 어류 영양원으로써 저서생산의 중요성 평가)

  • Kang, Chang-Keun;Choy, Eun-Jung;Kim, Young-Sang;Park, Hyun-Je
    • The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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    • v.14 no.1
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    • pp.56-62
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    • 2009
  • Stable carbon isotope analysis was used to investigate the autotrophic carbon sources supporting fisheries in three coastal bay systems of the southern coast of Korea. Carbon isotope ratios (${\delta}^{13}C$) of 31 fish species were analysed and compared with those of a range of potential primary food sources [e.g., seagrass (Zostera marina), seagrass epiphytes, benthic microalgae, macroalgae, marine particulate organic matter (marine POM), marsh plant (Phragmites australis) and terrestrial POM]. ${\delta}^{13}C$ values (range, -16.2${\sim}$-8.3‰) of fishes from the coastal embayment systems were overlapped with those of seagrass (-8.3${\pm}$1.9‰), seagrass epiphytes (-12.4${\pm}$0.6‰), benthic microalgae (-15.4${\pm}$1.6‰) and macroalgae (-16.0${\pm}$1.8‰). In addition, fishes (-12.9${\pm}$1.5‰) from the study area had distinctly higher ${\delta}^{13}C$ values compared to those collected in offshore sites (-17.3${\pm}$0.8‰) of the southern sea of Korea and Nakdong River (-23.2${\pm}$1.6‰). This result indicates that carbon supporting fish communities of these coastal bay systems is mainly derived from the local benthic producers.

A Comparative Study of Information Delivery Method in Networks According to Off-line Communication (오프라인 커뮤니케이션 유무에 따른 네트워크 별 정보전달 방법 비교 분석)

  • Park, Won-Kuk;Choi, Chan;Moon, Hyun-Sil;Choi, Il-Young;Kim, Jae-Kyeong
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.17 no.4
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    • pp.131-142
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    • 2011
  • In recent years, Social Network Service, which is defined as a web-based service that allows an individual to construct a public or a semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulates a list of other users with whom they share connections, and traverses their list of connections. For example, Facebook and Twitter are the representative sites of Social Network Service, and these sites are the big issue in the world. A lot of people use Social Network Services to connect and maintain social relationship. Recently the users of Social Network Services have increased dramatically. Accordingly, many organizations become interested in Social Network Services as means of marketing, media, communication with their customers, and so on, because social network services can offer a variety of benefits to organizations such as companies and associations. In other words, organizations can use Social Network Services to respond rapidly to various user's behaviors because Social Network Services can make it possible to communicate between the users more easily and faster. And marketing cost of the Social Network Service is lower than that of existing tools such as broadcasts, news papers, and direct mails. In addition, Social network Services are growing in market place. So, the organizations such as companies and associations can acquire potential customers for the future. However, organizations uniformly communicate with users through Social Network Service without consideration of the characteristics of the networks although networks have different effects on information deliveries. For example, members' cohesion in an offline communication is higher than that in an online communication because the members of the offline communication are very close. that is, the network of the offline communication has a strong tie. Accordingly, information delivery is fast in the network of the offline communication. In this study, we compose two networks which have different characteristic of communication in Twitter. First network is constructed with data based on an offline communication such as friend, family, senior and junior in school. Second network is constructed with randomly selected data from users who want to associate with friends in online. Each network size is 250 people who divide with three groups. The first group is an ego which means a person in the center of the network. The second group is the ego's followers. The last group is composed of the ego's follower's followers. We compare the networks through social network analysis and follower's reaction analysis. We investigate density and centrality to analyze the characteristic of each network. And we analyze the follower's reactions such as replies and retweets to find differences of information delivery in each network. Our experiment results indicate that density and centrality of the offline communicationbased network are higher than those of the online-based network. Also the number of replies are larger than that of retweets in the offline communication-based network. On the other hand, the number of retweets are larger than that of replies in the online based network. We identified that the effect of information delivery in the offline communication-based network was different from those in the online communication-based network through experiments. So, you configure the appropriate network types considering the characteristics of the network if you want to use social network as an effective marketing tool.

Comparison of the Working Conditions of Dental Hygienists Using Data from Online Job Sites (구인 사이트에 나타난 치과규모별 치과위생사 근무조건의 비교)

  • Oh, Eun-Ju;Hwang, Soo-Jeong
    • Journal of dental hygiene science
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    • v.17 no.6
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    • pp.501-507
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    • 2017
  • The shortage of dental hygienists has been a long-standing problem in Korea. Small-scaled dental clinics suffer from a lack of dental hygienists, who seem to prefer working at large-scaled dental clinics. The purpose of this study was to confirm the differences in the working conditions according to the scales of dental clinics. We collected the working information registered via job advertisements through the web-sites of Korean Dental Hygienists Association, Dental Jobs, and Nurse Jobs from July to August 2016. The results were as follows: 96.7% of the advertisements wanted regular workers, while the proportion of part-time workers was the highest (34.8%) in the group with less than 3 employees. The average workdays per week was $5.32{\pm}0.55$ days, and the group with less than 3 employees had significantly longer workdays than the other groups. The daily working time was $8.99{\pm}0.44$ hours, and there was no difference among the groups. Night overtime hours were needed by 54.4%, 45.0%, and 31.3% of the groups with of the groups with 4~7 employees, more than 8 employees, and less than 3 employees, respectively. Information regarding annual leave (60.5%), monthly leave (63.9%), half a day off (32.4%) and vacations (43.1%) were presented in the job advertisements, and these proportions were significantly higher by the group with more than 8 employees. Information on overtime pay (14.4%), night-work pay (13.4%), incentives (34.1%), lunches (60.2%), vacation bonuses (33.8%), and self-development (20.4%) were presented in job advertisements. The group with 4~7 employees had significantly higher proportions in severance pay, vacation bonuses, self-development, and major national insurance. It is necessary to consider the improvement of working conditions, diversity of working styles, and welfare of dental hygienists, and it is suggested that small dental clinics provide more precise working conditions.

An Analysis for Deriving New Convergent Service of Mobile Learning: The Case of Social Network Analysis and Association Rule (모바일 러닝에서의 신규 융합서비스 도출을 위한 분석: 사회연결망 분석과 연관성 분석 사례)

  • Baek, Heon;Kim, Jin Hwa;Kim, Yong Jin
    • Information Systems Review
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    • v.15 no.3
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    • pp.1-37
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    • 2013
  • This study is conducted to explore the possibility of service convergence to promote mobile learning. This study has attempted to identify how mobile learning service is provided, which services among them are considered most popular, and which services are highly demanded by users. This study has also investigated the potential opportunities for service convergence of mobile service and e-learning. This research is then extended to examine the possibility of active convergence of common services in mobile services and e-learning. Important variables have been identified from related web pages of portal sites using social network analysis (SNA) and association rules. Due to the differences in number and type of variables on different web pages, SNA was used to deal with the difficulties of identifying the degree of complex connection. Association analysis has been used to identify association rules among variables. The study has revealed that most frequent services among common services of mobile services and e-learning were Games and SNS followed by Payment, Advertising, Mail, Event, Animation, Cloud, e-Book, Augmented Reality and Jobs. This study has also found that Search, News, GPS in mobile services were turned out to be very highly demanded while Simulation, Culture, Public Education were highly demanded in e-learning. In addition, It has been found that variables involving with high service convergence based on common variables of mobile and e-learning services were Games and SNS, Games and Sports, SNS and Advertising, Games and Event, SNS and e-Book, Games and Community in mobile services while Games, Animation, Counseling, e-Book, being preceding services Simulation, Speaking, Public Education, Attendance Management were turned out be highly convergent in e-learning services. Finally, this study has attempted to predict possibility of active service convergence focusing on Games, SNS, e-Book which were highly demanded common services in mobile and e-learning services. It is expected that this study can be used to suggest a strategic direction to promote mobile learning by converging mobile services and e-learning.

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PIRS : Personalized Information Retrieval System using Adaptive User Profiling and Real-time Filtering for Search Results (적응형 사용자 프로파일기법과 검색 결과에 대한 실시간 필터링을 이용한 개인화 정보검색 시스템)

  • Jeon, Ho-Cheol;Choi, Joong-Min
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.16 no.4
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    • pp.21-41
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    • 2010
  • This paper proposes a system that can serve users with appropriate search results through real time filtering, and implemented adaptive user profiling based personalized information retrieval system(PIRS) using users' implicit feedbacks in order to deal with the problem of existing search systems such as Google or MSN that does not satisfy various user' personal search needs. One of the reasons that existing search systems hard to satisfy various user' personal needs is that it is not easy to recognize users' search intentions because of the uncertainty of search intentions. The uncertainty of search intentions means that users may want to different search results using the same query. For example, when a user inputs "java" query, the user may want to be retrieved "java" results as a computer programming language, a coffee of java, or a island of Indonesia. In other words, this uncertainty is due to ambiguity of search queries. Moreover, if the number of the used words for a query is fewer, this uncertainty will be more increased. Real-time filtering for search results returns only those results that belong to user-selected domain for a given query. Although it looks similar to a general directory search, it is different in that the search is executed for all web documents rather than sites, and each document in the search results is classified into the given domain in real time. By applying information filtering using real time directory classifying technology for search results to personalization, the number of delivering results to users is effectively decreased, and the satisfaction for the results is improved. In this paper, a user preference profile has a hierarchical structure, and consists of domains, used queries, and selected documents. Because the hierarchy structure of user preference profile can apply the context when users perfomed search, the structure is able to deal with the uncertainty of user intentions, when search is carried out, the intention may differ according to the context such as time or place for the same query. Furthermore, this structure is able to more effectively track web documents search behaviors of a user for each domain, and timely recognize the changes of user intentions. An IP address of each device was used to identify each user, and the user preference profile is continuously updated based on the observed user behaviors for search results. Also, we measured user satisfaction for search results by observing the user behaviors for the selected search result. Our proposed system automatically recognizes user preferences by using implicit feedbacks from users such as staying time on the selected search result and the exit condition from the page, and dynamically updates their preferences. Whenever search is performed by a user, our system finds the user preference profile for the given IP address, and if the file is not exist then a new user preference profile is created in the server, otherwise the file is updated with the transmitted information. If the file is not exist in the server, the system provides Google' results to users, and the reflection value is increased/decreased whenever user search. We carried out some experiments to evaluate the performance of adaptive user preference profile technique and real time filtering, and the results are satisfactory. According to our experimental results, participants are satisfied with average 4.7 documents in the top 10 search list by using adaptive user preference profile technique with real time filtering, and this result shows that our method outperforms Google's by 23.2%.

An Analysis of the Moderating Effects of User Ability on the Acceptance of an Internet Shopping Mall (인터넷 쇼핑몰 수용에 있어 사용자 능력의 조절효과 분석)

  • Suh, Kun-Soo
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.27-55
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    • 2008
  • Due to the increasing and intensifying competition in the Internet shopping market, it has been recognized as very important to develop an effective policy and strategy for acquiring loyal customers. For this reason, web site designers need to know if a new Internet shopping mall(ISM) will be accepted. Researchers have been working on identifying factors for explaining and predicting user acceptance of an ISM. Some studies, however, revealed inconsistent findings on the antecedents of user acceptance of a website. Lack of consideration for individual differences in user ability is believed to be one of the key reasons for the mixed findings. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and several studies have suggested that individual differences in ability plays an moderating role on the relationship between the antecedents and user acceptance. Despite the critical role of user ability, little research has examined the role of user ability in the Internet shopping mall context. The purpose of this study is to develop a user acceptance model that consider the moderating role of user ability in the context of Internet shopping. This study was initiated to see the ability of the technology acceptance model(TAM) to explain the acceptance of a specific ISM. According to TAM. which is one of the most influential models for explaining user acceptance of IT, an intention to use IT is determined by usefulness and ease of use. Given that interaction between user and website takes place through web interface, the decisions to accept and continue using an ISM depend on these beliefs. However, TAM neglects to consider the fact that many users would not stick to an ISM until they trust it although they may think it useful and easy to use. The importance of trust for user acceptance of ISM has been raised by the relational views. The relational view emphasizes the trust-building process between the user and ISM, and user's trust on the website is a major determinant of user acceptance. The proposed model extends and integrates the TAM and relational views on user acceptance of ISM by incorporating usefulness, ease of use, and trust. User acceptance is defined as a user's intention to reuse a specific ISM. And user ability is introduced into the model as moderating variable. Here, the user ability is defined as a degree of experiences, knowledge and skills regarding Internet shopping sites. The research model proposes that the ease of use, usefulness and trust of ISM are key determinants of user acceptance. In addition, this paper hypothesizes that the effects of the antecedents(i.e., ease of use, usefulness, and trust) on user acceptance may differ among users. In particular, this paper proposes a moderating effect of a user's ability on the relationship between antecedents with user's intention to reuse. The research model with eleven hypotheses was derived and tested through a survey that involved 470 university students. For each research variable, this paper used measurement items recognized for reliability and widely used in previous research. We slightly modified some items proper to the research context. The reliability and validity of the research variables were tested using the Crobnach's alpha and internal consistency reliability (ICR) values, standard factor loadings of the confirmative factor analysis, and average variance extracted (AVE) values. A LISREL method was used to test the suitability of the research model and its relating six hypotheses. Key findings of the results are summarized in the following. First, TAM's two constructs, ease of use and usefulness directly affect user acceptance. In addition, ease of use indirectly influences user acceptance by affecting trust. This implies that users tend to trust a shopping site and visit repeatedly when they perceive a specific ISM easy to use. Accordingly, designing a shopping site that allows users to navigate with heuristic and minimal clicks for finding information and products within the site is important for improving the site's trust and acceptance. Usefulness, however, was not found to influence trust. Second, among the three belief constructs(ease of use, usefulness, and trust), trust was empirically supported as the most important determinants of user acceptance. This implies that users require trustworthiness from an Internet shopping site to be repeat visitors of an ISM. Providing a sense of safety and eliminating the anxiety of online shoppers in relation to privacy, security, delivery, and product returns are critically important conditions for acquiring repeat visitors. Hence, in addition to usefulness and ease of use as in TAM, trust should be a fundamental determinants of user acceptance in the context of internet shopping. Third, the user's ability on using an Internet shopping site played a moderating role. For users with low ability, ease of use was found to be a more important factors in deciding to reuse the shopping mall, whereas usefulness and trust had more effects on users with high ability. Applying the EML theory to these findings, we can suggest that experienced and knowledgeable ISM users tend to elaborate on such usefulness aspects as efficient and effective shopping performance and trust factors as ability, benevolence, integrity, and predictability of a shopping site before they become repeat visitors of the site. In contrast, novice users tend to rely on the low elaborating features, such as the perceived ease of use. The existence of moderating effects suggests the fact that different individuals evaluate an ISM from different perspectives. The expert users are more interested in the outcome of the visit(usefulness) and trustworthiness(trust) than those novice visitors. The latter evaluate the ISM in a more superficial manner focusing on the novelty of the site and on other instrumental beliefs(ease of use). This is consistent with the insights proposed by the Heuristic-Systematic model. According to the Heuristic-Systematic model. a users act on the principle of minimum effort. Thus, the user considers an ISM heuristically, focusing on those aspects that are easy to process and evaluate(ease of use). When the user has sufficient experience and skills, the user will change to systematic processing, where they will evaluate more complex aspects of the site(its usefulness and trustworthiness). This implies that an ISM has to provide a minimum level of ease of use to make it possible for a user to evaluate its usefulness and trustworthiness. Ease of use is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the acceptance and use of an ISM. Overall, the empirical results generally support the proposed model and identify the moderating effect of the effects of user ability. More detailed interpretations and implications of the findings are discussed. The limitations of this study are also discussed to provide directions for future research.

Economic evaluation of a weekly administration of a sustained-release injection of recombinant human growth hormone for the treatment of children with growth hormone deficiency (소아 성장호르몬결핍증 치료에 사용되는 성장호르몬 서방형 주사제의 경제성 평가)

  • Kang, Hye-Young;Kim, Duk Hee;Yang, Sei-Won;Kim, Yoon-Nam;Kim, Miseon
    • Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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    • v.52 no.11
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    • pp.1249-1259
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    • 2009
  • Purpose:From a societal perspective, we evaluated the cost-effectiveness of a novel sustained-release injection of recombinant human growth hormone (GH) administered on a weekly basis compared with that of the present daily GH injection for the treatment of children with GH deficiency. Methods:Health-related utility for GH therapy was measured based on the visual analogue scale. During July 2008, caregivers of 149 children receiving GH therapy form 2 study sites participated in a web-based questionnaire survey. The survey required the caregivers to rate their current subjective utility with daily GH injections or expected utility of weekly GH injections. Because there was no difference in the costs of the daily and weekly therapies, for the purposes of this study, only drug acquisition costs were considered. Results:Switching from daily to weekly injection of GH increased the utility from 0.584 to 0.784 and incurred an extra cost of 4,060,811 Korean won (KW) per year. The incremental cost-utility ratio (ICUR) for a base case was 20,305,055 KW per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) gained. Scenario analyses showed that the ICUR ranged from 15,751,198 to 25,489,929 KW per QALY. Conclusion:The ICUR for a base case and worst case scenario analyses ranged from 0.85 to 1.37-times per capita gross domestic product of Korea, which is considered to be within the generally accepted willingness-to-pay threshold. Thus, it is concluded that switching from daily to weekly injection of GH would be cost-effective.

Latent topics-based product reputation mining (잠재 토픽 기반의 제품 평판 마이닝)

  • Park, Sang-Min;On, Byung-Won
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.23 no.2
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    • pp.39-70
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    • 2017
  • Data-drive analytics techniques have been recently applied to public surveys. Instead of simply gathering survey results or expert opinions to research the preference for a recently launched product, enterprises need a way to collect and analyze various types of online data and then accurately figure out customer preferences. In the main concept of existing data-based survey methods, the sentiment lexicon for a particular domain is first constructed by domain experts who usually judge the positive, neutral, or negative meanings of the frequently used words from the collected text documents. In order to research the preference for a particular product, the existing approach collects (1) review posts, which are related to the product, from several product review web sites; (2) extracts sentences (or phrases) in the collection after the pre-processing step such as stemming and removal of stop words is performed; (3) classifies the polarity (either positive or negative sense) of each sentence (or phrase) based on the sentiment lexicon; and (4) estimates the positive and negative ratios of the product by dividing the total numbers of the positive and negative sentences (or phrases) by the total number of the sentences (or phrases) in the collection. Furthermore, the existing approach automatically finds important sentences (or phrases) including the positive and negative meaning to/against the product. As a motivated example, given a product like Sonata made by Hyundai Motors, customers often want to see the summary note including what positive points are in the 'car design' aspect as well as what negative points are in thesame aspect. They also want to gain more useful information regarding other aspects such as 'car quality', 'car performance', and 'car service.' Such an information will enable customers to make good choice when they attempt to purchase brand-new vehicles. In addition, automobile makers will be able to figure out the preference and positive/negative points for new models on market. In the near future, the weak points of the models will be improved by the sentiment analysis. For this, the existing approach computes the sentiment score of each sentence (or phrase) and then selects top-k sentences (or phrases) with the highest positive and negative scores. However, the existing approach has several shortcomings and is limited to apply to real applications. The main disadvantages of the existing approach is as follows: (1) The main aspects (e.g., car design, quality, performance, and service) to a product (e.g., Hyundai Sonata) are not considered. Through the sentiment analysis without considering aspects, as a result, the summary note including the positive and negative ratios of the product and top-k sentences (or phrases) with the highest sentiment scores in the entire corpus is just reported to customers and car makers. This approach is not enough and main aspects of the target product need to be considered in the sentiment analysis. (2) In general, since the same word has different meanings across different domains, the sentiment lexicon which is proper to each domain needs to be constructed. The efficient way to construct the sentiment lexicon per domain is required because the sentiment lexicon construction is labor intensive and time consuming. To address the above problems, in this article, we propose a novel product reputation mining algorithm that (1) extracts topics hidden in review documents written by customers; (2) mines main aspects based on the extracted topics; (3) measures the positive and negative ratios of the product using the aspects; and (4) presents the digest in which a few important sentences with the positive and negative meanings are listed in each aspect. Unlike the existing approach, using hidden topics makes experts construct the sentimental lexicon easily and quickly. Furthermore, reinforcing topic semantics, we can improve the accuracy of the product reputation mining algorithms more largely than that of the existing approach. In the experiments, we collected large review documents to the domestic vehicles such as K5, SM5, and Avante; measured the positive and negative ratios of the three cars; showed top-k positive and negative summaries per aspect; and conducted statistical analysis. Our experimental results clearly show the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared with the existing method.

Why A Multimedia Approach to English Education\ulcorner

  • Keem, Sung-uk
    • Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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    • 1997.07a
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    • pp.176-178
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    • 1997
  • To make a long story short I made up my mind to experiment with a multimedia approach to my classroom presentations two years ago because my ways of giving instructions bored the pants off me as well as my students. My favorite ways used to be sometimes referred to as classical or traditional ones, heavily dependent on the three elements: teacher's mouth, books, and chalk. Some call it the 'MBC method'. To top it off, I tried audio-visuals such as tape recorders, cassette players, VTR, pictures, and you name it, that could help improve my teaching method. And yet I have been unhappy about the results by a trial and error approach. I was determined to look for a better way that would ensure my satisfaction in the first place. What really turned me on was a multimedia CD ROM title, ELLIS (English Language Learning Instructional Systems) developed by Dr. Frank Otto. This is an integrated system of learning English based on advanced computer technology. Inspired by the utility and potential of such a multimedia system for regular classroom or lab instructions, I designed a simple but practical multimedia language learning laboratory in 1994 for the first time in Korea(perhaps for the first time in the world). It was high time that the conventional type of language laboratory(audio-passive) at Hahnnam be replaced because of wear and tear. Prior to this development, in 1991, I put a first CALL(Computer Assisted Language Learning) laboratory equipped with 35 personal computers(286), where students were encouraged to practise English typing, word processing and study English grammar, English vocabulary, and English composition. The first multimedia language learning laboratory was composed of 1) a multimedia personal computer(486DX2 then, now 586), 2) VGA multipliers that enable simultaneous viewing of the screen at control of the instructor, 3) an amplifIer, 4) loud speakers, 5)student monitors, 6) student tables to seat three students(a monitor for two students is more realistic, though), 7) student chairs, 8) an instructor table, and 9) cables. It was augmented later with an Internet hookup. The beauty of this type of multimedia language learning laboratory is the economy of furnishing and maintaining it. There is no need of darkening the facilities, which is a must when an LCD/beam projector is preferred in the laboratory. It is headset free, which proved to make students exasperated when worn more than- twenty minutes. In the previous semester I taught three different subjects: Freshman English Lab, English Phonetics, and Listening Comprehension Intermediate. I used CD ROM titles like ELLIS, Master Pronunciation, English Tripple Play Plus, English Arcade, Living Books, Q-Steps, English Discoveries, Compton's Encyclopedia. On the other hand, I managed to put all teaching materials into PowerPoint, where letters, photo, graphic, animation, audio, and video files are orderly stored in terms of slides. It takes time for me to prepare my teaching materials via PowerPoint, but it is a wonderful tool for the sake of presentations. And it is worth trying as long as I can entertain my students in such a way. Once everything is put into the computer, I feel relaxed and a bit excited watching my students enjoy my presentations. It appears to be great fun for students because they have never experienced this type of instruction. This is how I freed myself from having to manipulate a cassette tape player, VTR, and write on the board. The student monitors in front of them seem to help them concentrate on what they see, combined with what they hear. All I have to do is to simply click a mouse to give presentations and explanations, when necessary. I use a remote mouse, which prevents me from sitting at the instructor table. Instead, I can walk around in the room and enjoy freer interactions with students. Using this instrument, I can also have my students participate in the presentation. In particular, I invite my students to manipulate the computer using the remote mouse from the student's seat not from the instructor's seat. Every student appears to be fascinated with my multimedia approach to English teaching because of its unique nature as a new teaching tool as we face the 21st century. They all agree that the multimedia way is an interesting and fascinating way of learning to satisfy their needs. Above all, it helps lighten their drudgery in the classroom. They feel other subjects taught by other teachers should be treated in the same fashion. A multimedia approach to education is impossible without the advent of hi-tech computers, of which multi functions are integrated into a unified system, i.e., a personal computer. If you have computer-phobia, make quick friends with it; the sooner, the better. It can be a wonderful assistant to you. It is the Internet that I pay close attention to in conjunction with the multimedia approach to English education. Via e-mail system, I encourage my students to write to me in English. I encourage them to enjoy chatting with people all over the world. I also encourage them to visit the sites where they offer study courses in English conversation, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, reading, and writing. I help them search any subject they want to via World Wide Web. Some day in the near future it will be the hub of learning for everybody. It will eventually free students from books, teachers, libraries, classrooms, and boredom. I will keep exploring better ways to give satisfying instructions to my students who deserve my entertainment.

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