• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2022

Despite recent breakthroughs in deep learning and computer vision fields, the pixel-wise identification of tiny objects in high-resolution images with complex disturbances remains challenging. This study proposes a modified U-net for tiny crack segmentation in real-world steel-box-girder bridges. The modified U-net adopts the common U-net framework and a novel Self-Attention-Self-Adaption (SASA) neuron as the fundamental computing element. The Self-Attention module applies softmax and gate operations to obtain the attention vector. It enables the neuron to focus on the most significant receptive fields when processing large-scale feature maps. The Self-Adaption module consists of a multiplayer perceptron subnet and achieves deeper feature extraction inside a single neuron. For data augmentation, a grid-based crack random elastic deformation (CRED) algorithm is designed to enrich the diversities and irregular shapes of distributed cracks. Grid-based uniform control nodes are first set on both input images and binary labels, random offsets are then employed on these control nodes, and bilinear interpolation is performed for the rest pixels. The proposed SASA neuron and CRED algorithm are simultaneously deployed to train the modified U-net. 200 raw images with a high resolution of 4928 × 3264 are collected, 160 for training and the rest 40 for the test. 512 × 512 patches are generated from the original images by a sliding window with an overlap of 256 as inputs. Results show that the average IoU between the recognized and ground-truth cracks reaches 0.409, which is 29.8% higher than the regular U-net. A five-fold cross-validation study is performed to verify that the proposed method is robust to different training and test images. Ablation experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SASA neuron and CRED algorithm. Promotions of the average IoU individually utilizing the SASA and CRED module add up to the final promotion of the full model, indicating that the SASA and CRED modules contribute to the different stages of model and data in the training process.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.34 no.12
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• pp.1045-1055
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• 2007

Latent topic models are statistical models which automatically captures salient patterns or correlation among features underlying a data collection in a probabilistic way. They are gaining an increased popularity as an effective tool in the application of automatic semantic feature extraction from text corpus, multimedia data analysis including image data, and bioinformatics. Among the important issues for the effectiveness in the application of latent topic models to the massive data set is the efficient learning of the model. The paper proposes an accelerated learning technique for PLSA model, one of the popular latent topic models, by an incremental EM algorithm instead of conventional EM algorithm. The incremental EM algorithm can be characterized by the employment of a series of partial E-steps that are performed on the corresponding subsets of the entire data collection, unlike in the conventional EM algorithm where one batch E-step is done for the whole data set. By the replacement of a single batch E-M step with a series of partial E-steps and M-steps, the inference result for the previous data subset can be directly reflected to the next inference process, which can enhance the learning speed for the entire data set. The algorithm is advantageous also in that it is guaranteed to converge to a local maximum solution and can be easily implemented just with slight modification of the existing algorithm based on the conventional EM. We present the basic application of the incremental EM algorithm to the learning of PLSA and empirically evaluate the acceleration performance with several possible data partitioning methods for the practical application. The experimental results on a real-world news data set show that the proposed approach can accomplish a meaningful enhancement of the convergence rate in the learning of latent topic model. Additionally, we present an interesting result which supports a possible synergistic effect of the combination of incremental EM algorithm with parallel computing.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.120-131
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• 2020

Water body detection using remote sensing based on machine interpretation of satellite image is efficient for managing water resource, drought and flood monitoring. In this study, water body detection with SAR satellite image based on machine learning was performed. However, non water body area can be misclassified to water body because of shadow effect or objects that have similar scattering characteristic comparing to water body, such as roads. To decrease misclassifying, 8 combination of morphology open filtered band, DEM band, curvature band and Cosmo-SkyMed SAR satellite image band about Mokpo region were trained to semantic segmentation machine learning models, respectively. For 8 case of machine learning models, global accuracy that is final test result was computed. Furthermore, concordance rate between landcover data of Mokpo region was calculated. In conclusion, combination of SAR satellite image, morphology open filtered band, DEM band and curvature band showed best result in global accuracy and concordance rate with landcover data. In that case, global accuracy was 95.07% and concordance rate with landcover data was 89.93%.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.131-150
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• 2015

Omission of noun phrases for obligatory cases is a common phenomenon in sentences of Korean and Japanese, which is not observed in English. When an argument of a predicate can be filled with a noun phrase co-referential with the title, the argument is more easily omitted in Encyclopedia texts. The omitted noun phrase is called a zero anaphor or zero pronoun. Encyclopedias like Wikipedia are major source for information extraction by intelligent application systems such as information retrieval and question answering systems. However, omission of noun phrases makes the quality of information extraction poor. This paper deals with the problem of developing a system that can restore omitted noun phrases in encyclopedia documents. The problem that our system deals with is almost similar to zero anaphora resolution which is one of the important problems in natural language processing. A noun phrase existing in the text that can be used for restoration is called an antecedent. An antecedent must be co-referential with the zero anaphor. While the candidates for the antecedent are only noun phrases in the same text in case of zero anaphora resolution, the title is also a candidate in our problem. In our system, the first stage is in charge of detecting the zero anaphor. In the second stage, antecedent search is carried out by considering the candidates. If antecedent search fails, an attempt made, in the third stage, to use the title as the antecedent. The main characteristic of our system is to make use of a structural SVM for finding the antecedent. The noun phrases in the text that appear before the position of zero anaphor comprise the search space. The main technique used in the methods proposed in previous research works is to perform binary classification for all the noun phrases in the search space. The noun phrase classified to be an antecedent with highest confidence is selected as the antecedent. However, we propose in this paper that antecedent search is viewed as the problem of assigning the antecedent indicator labels to a sequence of noun phrases. In other words, sequence labeling is employed in antecedent search in the text. We are the first to suggest this idea. To perform sequence labeling, we suggest to use a structural SVM which receives a sequence of noun phrases as input and returns the sequence of labels as output. An output label takes one of two values: one indicating that the corresponding noun phrase is the antecedent and the other indicating that it is not. The structural SVM we used is based on the modified Pegasos algorithm which exploits a subgradient descent methodology used for optimization problems. To train and test our system we selected a set of Wikipedia texts and constructed the annotated corpus in which gold-standard answers are provided such as zero anaphors and their possible antecedents. Training examples are prepared using the annotated corpus and used to train the SVMs and test the system. For zero anaphor detection, sentences are parsed by a syntactic analyzer and subject or object cases omitted are identified. Thus performance of our system is dependent on that of the syntactic analyzer, which is a limitation of our system. When an antecedent is not found in the text, our system tries to use the title to restore the zero anaphor. This is based on binary classification using the regular SVM. The experiment showed that our system's performance is F1 = 68.58%. This means that state-of-the-art system can be developed with our technique. It is expected that future work that enables the system to utilize semantic information can lead to a significant performance improvement.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.1-27
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• 2017

It is known that the economic sentiment index and macroeconomic indicators are closely related because economic agent's judgment and forecast of the business conditions affect economic fluctuations. For this reason, consumer sentiment or confidence provides steady fodder for business and is treated as an important piece of economic information. In Korea, private consumption accounts and consumer sentiment index highly relevant for both, which is a very important economic indicator for evaluating and forecasting the domestic economic situation. However, despite offering relevant insights into private consumption and GDP, the traditional approach to measuring the consumer confidence based on the survey has several limits. One possible weakness is that it takes considerable time to research, collect, and aggregate the data. If certain urgent issues arise, timely information will not be announced until the end of each month. In addition, the survey only contains information derived from questionnaire items, which means it can be difficult to catch up to the direct effects of newly arising issues. The survey also faces potential declines in response rates and erroneous responses. Therefore, it is necessary to find a way to complement it. For this purpose, we construct and assess an index designed to measure consumer economic sentiment index using sentiment analysis. Unlike the survey-based measures, our index relies on textual analysis to extract sentiment from economic and financial news articles. In particular, text data such as news articles and SNS are timely and cover a wide range of issues; because such sources can quickly capture the economic impact of specific economic issues, they have great potential as economic indicators. There exist two main approaches to the automatic extraction of sentiment from a text, we apply the lexicon-based approach, using sentiment lexicon dictionaries of words annotated with the semantic orientations. In creating the sentiment lexicon dictionaries, we enter the semantic orientation of individual words manually, though we do not attempt a full linguistic analysis (one that involves analysis of word senses or argument structure); this is the limitation of our research and further work in that direction remains possible. In this study, we generate a time series index of economic sentiment in the news. The construction of the index consists of three broad steps: (1) Collecting a large corpus of economic news articles on the web, (2) Applying lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis of each article to score the article in terms of sentiment orientation (positive, negative and neutral), and (3) Constructing an economic sentiment index of consumers by aggregating monthly time series for each sentiment word. In line with existing scholarly assessments of the relationship between the consumer confidence index and macroeconomic indicators, any new index should be assessed for its usefulness. We examine the new index's usefulness by comparing other economic indicators to the CSI. To check the usefulness of the newly index based on sentiment analysis, trend and cross - correlation analysis are carried out to analyze the relations and lagged structure. Finally, we analyze the forecasting power using the one step ahead of out of sample prediction. As a result, the news sentiment index correlates strongly with related contemporaneous key indicators in almost all experiments. We also find that news sentiment shocks predict future economic activity in most cases. In almost all experiments, the news sentiment index strongly correlates with related contemporaneous key indicators. Furthermore, in most cases, news sentiment shocks predict future economic activity; in head-to-head comparisons, the news sentiment measures outperform survey-based sentiment index as CSI. Policy makers want to understand consumer or public opinions about existing or proposed policies. Such opinions enable relevant government decision-makers to respond quickly to monitor various web media, SNS, or news articles. Textual data, such as news articles and social networks (Twitter, Facebook and blogs) are generated at high-speeds and cover a wide range of issues; because such sources can quickly capture the economic impact of specific economic issues, they have great potential as economic indicators. Although research using unstructured data in economic analysis is in its early stages, but the utilization of data is expected to greatly increase once its usefulness is confirmed.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.19-41
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• 2019

According to the rapidly increasing demand for text data analysis, research and investment in text mining are being actively conducted not only in academia but also in various industries. Text mining is generally conducted in two steps. In the first step, the text of the collected document is tokenized and structured to convert the original document into a computer-readable form. In the second step, tasks such as document classification, clustering, and topic modeling are conducted according to the purpose of analysis. Until recently, text mining-related studies have been focused on the application of the second steps, such as document classification, clustering, and topic modeling. However, with the discovery that the text structuring process substantially influences the quality of the analysis results, various embedding methods have actively been studied to improve the quality of analysis results by preserving the meaning of words and documents in the process of representing text data as vectors. Unlike structured data, which can be directly applied to a variety of operations and traditional analysis techniques, Unstructured text should be preceded by a structuring task that transforms the original document into a form that the computer can understand before analysis. It is called "Embedding" that arbitrary objects are mapped to a specific dimension space while maintaining algebraic properties for structuring the text data. Recently, attempts have been made to embed not only words but also sentences, paragraphs, and entire documents in various aspects. Particularly, with the demand for analysis of document embedding increases rapidly, many algorithms have been developed to support it. Among them, doc2Vec which extends word2Vec and embeds each document into one vector is most widely used. However, the traditional document embedding method represented by doc2Vec generates a vector for each document using the whole corpus included in the document. This causes a limit that the document vector is affected by not only core words but also miscellaneous words. Additionally, the traditional document embedding schemes usually map each document into a single corresponding vector. Therefore, it is difficult to represent a complex document with multiple subjects into a single vector accurately using the traditional approach. In this paper, we propose a new multi-vector document embedding method to overcome these limitations of the traditional document embedding methods. This study targets documents that explicitly separate body content and keywords. In the case of a document without keywords, this method can be applied after extract keywords through various analysis methods. However, since this is not the core subject of the proposed method, we introduce the process of applying the proposed method to documents that predefine keywords in the text. The proposed method consists of (1) Parsing, (2) Word Embedding, (3) Keyword Vector Extraction, (4) Keyword Clustering, and (5) Multiple-Vector Generation. The specific process is as follows. all text in a document is tokenized and each token is represented as a vector having N-dimensional real value through word embedding. After that, to overcome the limitations of the traditional document embedding method that is affected by not only the core word but also the miscellaneous words, vectors corresponding to the keywords of each document are extracted and make up sets of keyword vector for each document. Next, clustering is conducted on a set of keywords for each document to identify multiple subjects included in the document. Finally, a Multi-vector is generated from vectors of keywords constituting each cluster. The experiments for 3.147 academic papers revealed that the single vector-based traditional approach cannot properly map complex documents because of interference among subjects in each vector. With the proposed multi-vector based method, we ascertained that complex documents can be vectorized more accurately by eliminating the interference among subjects.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.125-155
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• 2010

Ontologies have been adopted in various business and scientific communities as a key component of the Semantic Web. Despite the increasing importance of ontologies, ontology developers still perceive construction tasks as a challenge. A clearly defined and well-structured methodology can reduce the time required to develop an ontology and increase the probability of success of a project. However, no reliable knowledge-engineering methodology for ontology development currently exists; every methodology has been tailored toward the development of a particular ontology. In this study, we developed a Graduation Screen Ontology (GSO). The graduation screen domain was chosen for the several reasons. First, the graduation screen process is a complicated task requiring a complex reasoning process. Second, GSO may be reused for other universities because the graduation screen process is similar for most universities. Finally, GSO can be built within a given period because the size of the selected domain is reasonable. No standard ontology development methodology exists; thus, one of the existing ontology development methodologies had to be chosen. The most important considerations for selecting the ontology development methodology of GSO included whether it can be applied to a new domain; whether it covers a broader set of development tasks; and whether it gives sufficient explanation of each development task. We evaluated various ontology development methodologies based on the evaluation framework proposed by G$\acute{o}$mez-P$\acute{e}$rez et al. We concluded that METHONTOLOGY was the most applicable to the building of GSO for this study. METHONTOLOGY was derived from the experience of developing Chemical Ontology at the Polytechnic University of Madrid by Fern$\acute{a}$ndez-L$\acute{o}$pez et al. and is regarded as the most mature ontology development methodology. METHONTOLOGY describes a very detailed approach for building an ontology under a centralized development environment at the conceptual level. This methodology consists of three broad processes, with each process containing specific sub-processes: management (scheduling, control, and quality assurance); development (specification, conceptualization, formalization, implementation, and maintenance); and support process (knowledge acquisition, evaluation, documentation, configuration management, and integration). An ontology development language and ontology development tool for GSO construction also had to be selected. We adopted OWL-DL as the ontology development language. OWL was selected because of its computational quality of consistency in checking and classification, which is crucial in developing coherent and useful ontological models for very complex domains. In addition, Protege-OWL was chosen for an ontology development tool because it is supported by METHONTOLOGY and is widely used because of its platform-independent characteristics. Based on the GSO development experience of the researchers, some issues relating to the METHONTOLOGY, OWL-DL, and Prot$\acute{e}$g$\acute{e}$-OWL were identified. We focused on presenting drawbacks of METHONTOLOGY and discussing how each weakness could be addressed. First, METHONTOLOGY insists that domain experts who do not have ontology construction experience can easily build ontologies. However, it is still difficult for these domain experts to develop a sophisticated ontology, especially if they have insufficient background knowledge related to the ontology. Second, METHONTOLOGY does not include a development stage called the "feasibility study." This pre-development stage helps developers ensure not only that a planned ontology is necessary and sufficiently valuable to begin an ontology building project, but also to determine whether the project will be successful. Third, METHONTOLOGY excludes an explanation on the use and integration of existing ontologies. If an additional stage for considering reuse is introduced, developers might share benefits of reuse. Fourth, METHONTOLOGY fails to address the importance of collaboration. This methodology needs to explain the allocation of specific tasks to different developer groups, and how to combine these tasks once specific given jobs are completed. Fifth, METHONTOLOGY fails to suggest the methods and techniques applied in the conceptualization stage sufficiently. Introducing methods of concept extraction from multiple informal sources or methods of identifying relations may enhance the quality of ontologies. Sixth, METHONTOLOGY does not provide an evaluation process to confirm whether WebODE perfectly transforms a conceptual ontology into a formal ontology. It also does not guarantee whether the outcomes of the conceptualization stage are completely reflected in the implementation stage. Seventh, METHONTOLOGY needs to add criteria for user evaluation of the actual use of the constructed ontology under user environments. Eighth, although METHONTOLOGY allows continual knowledge acquisition while working on the ontology development process, consistent updates can be difficult for developers. Ninth, METHONTOLOGY demands that developers complete various documents during the conceptualization stage; thus, it can be considered a heavy methodology. Adopting an agile methodology will result in reinforcing active communication among developers and reducing the burden of documentation completion. Finally, this study concludes with contributions and practical implications. No previous research has addressed issues related to METHONTOLOGY from empirical experiences; this study is an initial attempt. In addition, several lessons learned from the development experience are discussed. This study also affords some insights for ontology methodology researchers who want to design a more advanced ontology development methodology.