• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.49-65
• /
• 2014

Word of Mouth (WOM) is a behavior used by consumers to transfer or communicate their product or service experience to other consumers. Due to the popularity of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and online communities, electronic WOM (e-WOM) has become important to the success of products or services. As a result, most enterprises pay close attention to e-WOM for their products or services. This is especially important for movies, as these are experiential products. This paper aims to identify the network factors of an online movie community that impact box office revenue using social network analysis. In addition to traditional WOM factors (volume and valence of WOM), network centrality measures of the online community are included as influential factors in box office revenue. Based on previous research results, we develop five hypotheses on the relationships between potential influential factors (WOM volume, WOM valence, degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality) and box office revenue. The first hypothesis is that the accumulated volume of WOM in online product communities is positively related to the total revenue of movies. The second hypothesis is that the accumulated valence of WOM in online product communities is positively related to the total revenue of movies. The third hypothesis is that the average of degree centralities of reviewers in online product communities is positively related to the total revenue of movies. The fourth hypothesis is that the average of betweenness centralities of reviewers in online product communities is positively related to the total revenue of movies. The fifth hypothesis is that the average of betweenness centralities of reviewers in online product communities is positively related to the total revenue of movies. To verify our research model, we collect movie review data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which is a representative online movie community, and movie revenue data from the Box-Office-Mojo website. The movies in this analysis include weekly top-10 movies from September 1, 2012, to September 1, 2013, with in total. We collect movie metadata such as screening periods and user ratings; and community data in IMDb including reviewer identification, review content, review times, responder identification, reply content, reply times, and reply relationships. For the same period, the revenue data from Box-Office-Mojo is collected on a weekly basis. Movie community networks are constructed based on reply relationships between reviewers. Using a social network analysis tool, NodeXL, we calculate the averages of three centralities including degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality for each movie. Correlation analysis of focal variables and the dependent variable (final revenue) shows that three centrality measures are highly correlated, prompting us to perform multiple regressions separately with each centrality measure. Consistent with previous research results, our regression analysis results show that the volume and valence of WOM are positively related to the final box office revenue of movies. Moreover, the averages of betweenness centralities from initial community networks impact the final movie revenues. However, both of the averages of degree centralities and closeness centralities do not influence final movie performance. Based on the regression results, three hypotheses, 1, 2, and 4, are accepted, and two hypotheses, 3 and 5, are rejected. This study tries to link the network structure of e-WOM on online product communities with the product's performance. Based on the analysis of a real online movie community, the results show that online community network structures can work as a predictor of movie performance. The results show that the betweenness centralities of the reviewer community are critical for the prediction of movie performance. However, degree centralities and closeness centralities do not influence movie performance. As future research topics, similar analyses are required for other product categories such as electronic goods and online content to generalize the study results.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.29-45
• /
• 2012

Bond rating is regarded as an important event for measuring financial risk of companies and for determining the investment returns of investors. As a result, it has been a popular research topic for researchers to predict companies' credit ratings by applying statistical and machine learning techniques. The statistical techniques, including multiple regression, multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), logistic models (LOGIT), and probit analysis, have been traditionally used in bond rating. However, one major drawback is that it should be based on strict assumptions. Such strict assumptions include linearity, normality, independence among predictor variables and pre-existing functional forms relating the criterion variablesand the predictor variables. Those strict assumptions of traditional statistics have limited their application to the real world. Machine learning techniques also used in bond rating prediction models include decision trees (DT), neural networks (NN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Especially, SVM is recognized as a new and promising classification and regression analysis method. SVM learns a separating hyperplane that can maximize the margin between two categories. SVM is simple enough to be analyzed mathematical, and leads to high performance in practical applications. SVM implements the structuralrisk minimization principle and searches to minimize an upper bound of the generalization error. In addition, the solution of SVM may be a global optimum and thus, overfitting is unlikely to occur with SVM. In addition, SVM does not require too many data sample for training since it builds prediction models by only using some representative sample near the boundaries called support vectors. A number of experimental researches have indicated that SVM has been successfully applied in a variety of pattern recognition fields. However, there are three major drawbacks that can be potential causes for degrading SVM's performance. First, SVM is originally proposed for solving binary-class classification problems. Methods for combining SVMs for multi-class classification such as One-Against-One, One-Against-All have been proposed, but they do not improve the performance in multi-class classification problem as much as SVM for binary-class classification. Second, approximation algorithms (e.g. decomposition methods, sequential minimal optimization algorithm) could be used for effective multi-class computation to reduce computation time, but it could deteriorate classification performance. Third, the difficulty in multi-class prediction problems is in data imbalance problem that can occur when the number of instances in one class greatly outnumbers the number of instances in the other class. Such data sets often cause a default classifier to be built due to skewed boundary and thus the reduction in the classification accuracy of such a classifier. SVM ensemble learning is one of machine learning methods to cope with the above drawbacks. Ensemble learning is a method for improving the performance of classification and prediction algorithms. AdaBoost is one of the widely used ensemble learning techniques. It constructs a composite classifier by sequentially training classifiers while increasing weight on the misclassified observations through iterations. The observations that are incorrectly predicted by previous classifiers are chosen more often than examples that are correctly predicted. Thus Boosting attempts to produce new classifiers that are better able to predict examples for which the current ensemble's performance is poor. In this way, it can reinforce the training of the misclassified observations of the minority class. This paper proposes a multiclass Geometric Mean-based Boosting (MGM-Boost) to resolve multiclass prediction problem. Since MGM-Boost introduces the notion of geometric mean into AdaBoost, it can perform learning process considering the geometric mean-based accuracy and errors of multiclass. This study applies MGM-Boost to the real-world bond rating case for Korean companies to examine the feasibility of MGM-Boost. 10-fold cross validations for threetimes with different random seeds are performed in order to ensure that the comparison among three different classifiers does not happen by chance. For each of 10-fold cross validation, the entire data set is first partitioned into tenequal-sized sets, and then each set is in turn used as the test set while the classifier trains on the other nine sets. That is, cross-validated folds have been tested independently of each algorithm. Through these steps, we have obtained the results for classifiers on each of the 30 experiments. In the comparison of arithmetic mean-based prediction accuracy between individual classifiers, MGM-Boost (52.95%) shows higher prediction accuracy than both AdaBoost (51.69%) and SVM (49.47%). MGM-Boost (28.12%) also shows the higher prediction accuracy than AdaBoost (24.65%) and SVM (15.42%)in terms of geometric mean-based prediction accuracy. T-test is used to examine whether the performance of each classifiers for 30 folds is significantly different. The results indicate that performance of MGM-Boost is significantly different from AdaBoost and SVM classifiers at 1% level. These results mean that MGM-Boost can provide robust and stable solutions to multi-classproblems such as bond rating.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.77-97
• /
• 2010

Market timing is an investment strategy which is used for obtaining excessive return from financial market. In general, detection of market timing means determining when to buy and sell to get excess return from trading. In many market timing systems, trading rules have been used as an engine to generate signals for trade. On the other hand, some researchers proposed the rough set analysis as a proper tool for market timing because it does not generate a signal for trade when the pattern of the market is uncertain by using the control function. The data for the rough set analysis should be discretized of numeric value because the rough set only accepts categorical data for analysis. Discretization searches for proper "cuts" for numeric data that determine intervals. All values that lie within each interval are transformed into same value. In general, there are four methods for data discretization in rough set analysis including equal frequency scaling, expert's knowledge-based discretization, minimum entropy scaling, and na$\ddot{i}$ve and Boolean reasoning-based discretization. Equal frequency scaling fixes a number of intervals and examines the histogram of each variable, then determines cuts so that approximately the same number of samples fall into each of the intervals. Expert's knowledge-based discretization determines cuts according to knowledge of domain experts through literature review or interview with experts. Minimum entropy scaling implements the algorithm based on recursively partitioning the value set of each variable so that a local measure of entropy is optimized. Na$\ddot{i}$ve and Booleanreasoning-based discretization searches categorical values by using Na$\ddot{i}$ve scaling the data, then finds the optimized dicretization thresholds through Boolean reasoning. Although the rough set analysis is promising for market timing, there is little research on the impact of the various data discretization methods on performance from trading using the rough set analysis. In this study, we compare stock market timing models using rough set analysis with various data discretization methods. The research data used in this study are the KOSPI 200 from May 1996 to October 1998. KOSPI 200 is the underlying index of the KOSPI 200 futures which is the first derivative instrument in the Korean stock market. The KOSPI 200 is a market value weighted index which consists of 200 stocks selected by criteria on liquidity and their status in corresponding industry including manufacturing, construction, communication, electricity and gas, distribution and services, and financing. The total number of samples is 660 trading days. In addition, this study uses popular technical indicators as independent variables. The experimental results show that the most profitable method for the training sample is the na$\ddot{i}$ve and Boolean reasoning but the expert's knowledge-based discretization is the most profitable method for the validation sample. In addition, the expert's knowledge-based discretization produced robust performance for both of training and validation sample. We also compared rough set analysis and decision tree. This study experimented C4.5 for the comparison purpose. The results show that rough set analysis with expert's knowledge-based discretization produced more profitable rules than C4.5.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.26 no.2
• /
• pp.27-42
• /
• 2020

Traditional companies with offline stores were unable to secure large display space due to the problems of cost. This limitation inevitably allowed limited kinds of products to be displayed on the shelves, which resulted in consumers being deprived of the opportunity to experience various items. Taking advantage of the virtual space called the Internet, online shopping goes beyond the limits of limitations in physical space of offline shopping and is now able to display numerous products on web pages that can satisfy consumers with a variety of needs. Paradoxically, however, this can also cause consumers to experience the difficulty of comparing and evaluating too many alternatives in their purchase decision-making process. As an effort to address this side effect, various kinds of consumer's purchase decision support systems have been studied, such as keyword-based item search service and recommender systems. These systems can reduce search time for items, prevent consumer from leaving while browsing, and contribute to the seller's increased sales. Among those systems, recommender systems based on association rule mining techniques can effectively detect interrelated products from transaction data such as orders. The association between products obtained by statistical analysis provides clues to predicting how interested consumers will be in another product. However, since its algorithm is based on the number of transactions, products not sold enough so far in the early days of launch may not be included in the list of recommendations even though they are highly likely to be sold. Such missing items may not have sufficient opportunities to be exposed to consumers to record sufficient sales, and then fall into a vicious cycle of a vicious cycle of declining sales and omission in the recommendation list. This situation is an inevitable outcome in situations in which recommendations are made based on past transaction histories, rather than on determining potential future sales possibilities. This study started with the idea that reflecting the means by which this potential possibility can be identified indirectly would help to select highly recommended products. In the light of the fact that the attributes of a product affect the consumer's purchasing decisions, this study was conducted to reflect them in the recommender systems. In other words, consumers who visit a product page have shown interest in the attributes of the product and would be also interested in other products with the same attributes. On such assumption, based on these attributes, the recommender system can select recommended products that can show a higher acceptance rate. Given that a category is one of the main attributes of a product, it can be a good indicator of not only direct associations between two items but also potential associations that have yet to be revealed. Based on this idea, the study devised a recommender system that reflects not only associations between products but also categories. Through regression analysis, two kinds of associations were combined to form a model that could predict the hit rate of recommendation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, another regression model was also developed based only on associations between products. Comparative experiments were designed to be similar to the environment in which products are actually recommended in online shopping malls. First, the association rules for all possible combinations of antecedent and consequent items were generated from the order data. Then, hit rates for each of the associated rules were predicted from the support and confidence that are calculated by each of the models. The comparative experiments using order data collected from an online shopping mall show that the recommendation accuracy can be improved by further reflecting not only the association between products but also categories in the recommendation of related products. The proposed model showed a 2 to 3 percent improvement in hit rates compared to the existing model. From a practical point of view, it is expected to have a positive effect on improving consumers' purchasing satisfaction and increasing sellers' sales.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.19 no.1
• /
• pp.79-94
• /
• 2013

Recently, the high value added business is steadily growing in the culture and art area. To generated high value from a performance, the satisfaction of audience is necessary. The flow in a critical factor for satisfaction, and it should be induced from audience and measures. To evaluate interest and emotion of audience on contents, producers or investors need a kind of index for the measurement of the flow. But it is neither easy to define the flow quantitatively, nor to collect audience's reaction immediately. The previous studies of the group flow were evaluated by the sum of the average value of each person's reaction. The flow or "good feeling" from each audience was extracted from his face, especially, the change of his (or her) expression and body movement. But it was not easy to handle the large amount of real-time data from each sensor signals. And also it was difficult to set experimental devices, in terms of economic and environmental problems. Because, all participants should have their own personal sensor to check their physical signal. Also each camera should be located in front of their head to catch their looks. Therefore we need more simple system to analyze group flow. This study provides the method for measurement of audiences flow with group synchronization at same time and place. To measure the synchronization, we made real-time processing system using the Differential Image and Group Emotion Analysis (GEA) system. Differential Image was obtained from camera and by the previous frame was subtracted from present frame. So the movement variation on audience's reaction was obtained. And then we developed a program, GEX(Group Emotion Analysis), for flow judgment model. After the measurement of the audience's reaction, the synchronization is divided as Dynamic State Synchronization and Static State Synchronization. The Dynamic State Synchronization accompanies audience's active reaction, while the Static State Synchronization means to movement of audience. The Dynamic State Synchronization can be caused by the audience's surprise action such as scary, creepy or reversal scene. And the Static State Synchronization was triggered by impressed or sad scene. Therefore we showed them several short movies containing various scenes mentioned previously. And these kind of scenes made them sad, clap, and creepy, etc. To check the movement of audience, we defined the critical point, ${\alpha}$and ${\beta}$. Dynamic State Synchronization was meaningful when the movement value was over critical point ${\beta}$, while Static State Synchronization was effective under critical point ${\alpha}$. ${\beta}$ is made by audience' clapping movement of 10 teams in stead of using average number of movement. After checking the reactive movement of audience, the percentage(%) ratio was calculated from the division of "people having reaction" by "total people". Total 37 teams were made in "2012 Seoul DMC Culture Open" and they involved the experiments. First, they followed induction to clap by staff. Second, basic scene for neutralize emotion of audience. Third, flow scene was displayed to audience. Forth, the reversal scene was introduced. And then 24 teams of them were provided with amuse and creepy scenes. And the other 10 teams were exposed with the sad scene. There were clapping and laughing action of audience on the amuse scene with shaking their head or hid with closing eyes. And also the sad or touching scene made them silent. If the results were over about 80%, the group could be judged as the synchronization and the flow were achieved. As a result, the audience showed similar reactions about similar stimulation at same time and place. Once we get an additional normalization and experiment, we can obtain find the flow factor through the synchronization on a much bigger group and this should be useful for planning contents.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.25 no.2
• /
• pp.39-55
• /
• 2019

Recently banks and large financial institutions have introduced lots of Robo-Advisor products. Robo-Advisor is a Robot to produce the optimal asset allocation portfolio for investors by using the financial engineering algorithms without any human intervention. Since the first introduction in Wall Street in 2008, the market size has grown to 60 billion dollars and is expected to expand to 2,000 billion dollars by 2020. Since Robo-Advisor algorithms suggest asset allocation output to investors, mathematical or statistical asset allocation strategies are applied. Mean variance optimization model developed by Markowitz is the typical asset allocation model. The model is a simple but quite intuitive portfolio strategy. For example, assets are allocated in order to minimize the risk on the portfolio while maximizing the expected return on the portfolio using optimization techniques. Despite its theoretical background, both academics and practitioners find that the standard mean variance optimization portfolio is very sensitive to the expected returns calculated by past price data. Corner solutions are often found to be allocated only to a few assets. The Black-Litterman Optimization model overcomes these problems by choosing a neutral Capital Asset Pricing Model equilibrium point. Implied equilibrium returns of each asset are derived from equilibrium market portfolio through reverse optimization. The Black-Litterman model uses a Bayesian approach to combine the subjective views on the price forecast of one or more assets with implied equilibrium returns, resulting a new estimates of risk and expected returns. These new estimates can produce optimal portfolio by the well-known Markowitz mean-variance optimization algorithm. If the investor does not have any views on his asset classes, the Black-Litterman optimization model produce the same portfolio as the market portfolio. What if the subjective views are incorrect? A survey on reports of stocks performance recommended by securities analysts show very poor results. Therefore the incorrect views combined with implied equilibrium returns may produce very poor portfolio output to the Black-Litterman model users. This paper suggests an objective investor views model based on Support Vector Machines(SVM), which have showed good performance results in stock price forecasting. SVM is a discriminative classifier defined by a separating hyper plane. The linear, radial basis and polynomial kernel functions are used to learn the hyper planes. Input variables for the SVM are returns, standard deviations, Stochastics %K and price parity degree for each asset class. SVM output returns expected stock price movements and their probabilities, which are used as input variables in the intelligent views model. The stock price movements are categorized by three phases; down, neutral and up. The expected stock returns make P matrix and their probability results are used in Q matrix. Implied equilibrium returns vector is combined with the intelligent views matrix, resulting the Black-Litterman optimal portfolio. For comparisons, Markowitz mean-variance optimization model and risk parity model are used. The value weighted market portfolio and equal weighted market portfolio are used as benchmark indexes. We collect the 8 KOSPI 200 sector indexes from January 2008 to December 2018 including 132 monthly index values. Training period is from 2008 to 2015 and testing period is from 2016 to 2018. Our suggested intelligent view model combined with implied equilibrium returns produced the optimal Black-Litterman portfolio. The out of sample period portfolio showed better performance compared with the well-known Markowitz mean-variance optimization portfolio, risk parity portfolio and market portfolio. The total return from 3 year-period Black-Litterman portfolio records 6.4%, which is the highest value. The maximum draw down is -20.8%, which is also the lowest value. Sharpe Ratio shows the highest value, 0.17. It measures the return to risk ratio. Overall, our suggested view model shows the possibility of replacing subjective analysts's views with objective view model for practitioners to apply the Robo-Advisor asset allocation algorithms in the real trading fields.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.67-83
• /
• 2018

The Korean film industry with significant increase every year exceeded the number of cumulative audiences of 200 million people in 2013 finally. However, starting from 2015 the Korean film industry entered a period of low growth and experienced a negative growth after all in 2016. To overcome such difficulty, stakeholders like production company, distribution company, multiplex have attempted to maximize the market returns using strategies of predicting change of market and of responding to such market change immediately. Since a film is classified as one of experiential products, it is not easy to predict a box office record and the initial number of audiences before the film is released. And also, the number of audiences fluctuates with a variety of factors after the film is released. So, the production company and distribution company try to be guaranteed the number of screens at the opining time of a newly released by multiplex chains. However, the multiplex chains tend to open the screening schedule during only a week and then determine the number of screening of the forthcoming week based on the box office record and the evaluation of audiences. Many previous researches have conducted to deal with the prediction of box office records of films. In the early stage, the researches attempted to identify factors affecting the box office record. And nowadays, many studies have tried to apply various analytic techniques to the factors identified previously in order to improve the accuracy of prediction and to explain the effect of each factor instead of identifying new factors affecting the box office record. However, most of previous researches have limitations in that they used the total number of audiences from the opening to the end as a target variable, and this makes it difficult to predict and respond to the demand of market which changes dynamically. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to predict the weekly number of audiences of a newly released film so that the stakeholder can flexibly and elastically respond to the change of the number of audiences in the film. To that end, we considered the factors used in the previous studies affecting box office and developed new factors not used in previous studies such as the order of opening of movies, dynamics of sales. Along with the comprehensive factors, we used the machine learning method such as Random Forest, Multi Layer Perception, Support Vector Machine, and Naive Bays, to predict the number of cumulative visitors from the first week after a film release to the third week. At the point of the first and the second week, we predicted the cumulative number of visitors of the forthcoming week for a released film. And at the point of the third week, we predict the total number of visitors of the film. In addition, we predicted the total number of cumulative visitors also at the point of the both first week and second week using the same factors. As a result, we found the accuracy of predicting the number of visitors at the forthcoming week was higher than that of predicting the total number of them in all of three weeks, and also the accuracy of the Random Forest was the highest among the machine learning methods we used. This study has implications in that this study 1) considered various factors comprehensively which affect the box office record and merely addressed by other previous researches such as the weekly rating of audiences after release, the weekly rank of the film after release, and the weekly sales share after release, and 2) tried to predict and respond to the demand of market which changes dynamically by suggesting models which predicts the weekly number of audiences of newly released films so that the stakeholders can flexibly and elastically respond to the change of the number of audiences in the film.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.26 no.4
• /
• pp.111-126
• /
• 2020

Most industries have recently become aware of the importance of customer lifetime value as they are exposed to a competitive environment. As a result, preventing customers from churn is becoming a more important business issue than securing new customers. This is because maintaining churn customers is far more economical than securing new customers, and in fact, the acquisition cost of new customers is known to be five to six times higher than the maintenance cost of churn customers. Also, Companies that effectively prevent customer churn and improve customer retention rates are known to have a positive effect on not only increasing the company's profitability but also improving its brand image by improving customer satisfaction. Predicting customer churn, which had been conducted as a sub-research area for CRM, has recently become more important as a big data-based performance marketing theme due to the development of business machine learning technology. Until now, research on customer churn prediction has been carried out actively in such sectors as the mobile telecommunication industry, the financial industry, the distribution industry, and the game industry, which are highly competitive and urgent to manage churn. In addition, These churn prediction studies were focused on improving the performance of the churn prediction model itself, such as simply comparing the performance of various models, exploring features that are effective in forecasting departures, or developing new ensemble techniques, and were limited in terms of practical utilization because most studies considered the entire customer group as a group and developed a predictive model. As such, the main purpose of the existing related research was to improve the performance of the predictive model itself, and there was a relatively lack of research to improve the overall customer churn prediction process. In fact, customers in the business have different behavior characteristics due to heterogeneous transaction patterns, and the resulting churn rate is different, so it is unreasonable to assume the entire customer as a single customer group. Therefore, it is desirable to segment customers according to customer classification criteria, such as loyalty, and to operate an appropriate churn prediction model individually, in order to carry out effective customer churn predictions in heterogeneous industries. Of course, in some studies, there are studies in which customers are subdivided using clustering techniques and applied a churn prediction model for individual customer groups. Although this process of predicting churn can produce better predictions than a single predict model for the entire customer population, there is still room for improvement in that clustering is a mechanical, exploratory grouping technique that calculates distances based on inputs and does not reflect the strategic intent of an entity such as loyalties. This study proposes a segment-based customer departure prediction process (CCP/2DL: Customer Churn Prediction based on Two-Dimensional Loyalty segmentation) based on two-dimensional customer loyalty, assuming that successful customer churn management can be better done through improvements in the overall process than through the performance of the model itself. CCP/2DL is a series of churn prediction processes that segment two-way, quantitative and qualitative loyalty-based customer, conduct secondary grouping of customer segments according to churn patterns, and then independently apply heterogeneous churn prediction models for each churn pattern group. Performance comparisons were performed with the most commonly applied the General churn prediction process and the Clustering-based churn prediction process to assess the relative excellence of the proposed churn prediction process. The General churn prediction process used in this study refers to the process of predicting a single group of customers simply intended to be predicted as a machine learning model, using the most commonly used churn predicting method. And the Clustering-based churn prediction process is a method of first using clustering techniques to segment customers and implement a churn prediction model for each individual group. In cooperation with a global NGO, the proposed CCP/2DL performance showed better performance than other methodologies for predicting churn. This churn prediction process is not only effective in predicting churn, but can also be a strategic basis for obtaining a variety of customer observations and carrying out other related performance marketing activities.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.26 no.4
• /
• pp.1-25
• /
• 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
• /
• v.27 no.1
• /
• pp.23-46
• /
• 2021

Collaborative filtering, which is often used in personalization recommendations, is recognized as a very useful technique to find similar customers and recommend products to them based on their purchase history. However, the traditional collaborative filtering technique has raised the question of having difficulty calculating the similarity for new customers or products due to the method of calculating similaritiesbased on direct connections and common features among customers. For this reason, a hybrid technique was designed to use content-based filtering techniques together. On the one hand, efforts have been made to solve these problems by applying the structural characteristics of social networks. This applies a method of indirectly calculating similarities through their similar customers placed between them. This means creating a customer's network based on purchasing data and calculating the similarity between the two based on the features of the network that indirectly connects the two customers within this network. Such similarity can be used as a measure to predict whether the target customer accepts recommendations. The centrality metrics of networks can be utilized for the calculation of these similarities. Different centrality metrics have important implications in that they may have different effects on recommended performance. In this study, furthermore, the effect of these centrality metrics on the performance of recommendation may vary depending on recommender algorithms. In addition, recommendation techniques using network analysis can be expected to contribute to increasing recommendation performance even if they apply not only to new customers or products but also to entire customers or products. By considering a customer's purchase of an item as a link generated between the customer and the item on the network, the prediction of user acceptance of recommendation is solved as a prediction of whether a new link will be created between them. As the classification models fit the purpose of solving the binary problem of whether the link is engaged or not, decision tree, k-nearest neighbors (KNN), logistic regression, artificial neural network, and support vector machine (SVM) are selected in the research. The data for performance evaluation used order data collected from an online shopping mall over four years and two months. Among them, the previous three years and eight months constitute social networks composed of and the experiment was conducted by organizing the data collected into the social network. The next four months' records were used to train and evaluate recommender models. Experiments with the centrality metrics applied to each model show that the recommendation acceptance rates of the centrality metrics are different for each algorithm at a meaningful level. In this work, we analyzed only four commonly used centrality metrics: degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality. Eigenvector centrality records the lowest performance in all models except support vector machines. Closeness centrality and betweenness centrality show similar performance across all models. Degree centrality ranking moderate across overall models while betweenness centrality always ranking higher than degree centrality. Finally, closeness centrality is characterized by distinct differences in performance according to the model. It ranks first in logistic regression, artificial neural network, and decision tree withnumerically high performance. However, it only records very low rankings in support vector machine and K-neighborhood with low-performance levels. As the experiment results reveal, in a classification model, network centrality metrics over a subnetwork that connects the two nodes can effectively predict the connectivity between two nodes in a social network. Furthermore, each metric has a different performance depending on the classification model type. This result implies that choosing appropriate metrics for each algorithm can lead to achieving higher recommendation performance. In general, betweenness centrality can guarantee a high level of performance in any model. It would be possible to consider the introduction of proximity centrality to obtain higher performance for certain models.