• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.115-130
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• 2011

Many online stores bring features that can build trust in their customers. More so, the number of products or content services on online stores has been increasing rapidly. Hence, personalization on online stores is considered to be an important technology to companies and customers. Recommender systems that provide favorable products and customer product reviews to users are the most commonly used features in this purpose. There are many studies to that investigated the relationship between social presence as an antecedent of trust and provision of recommender systems or customer product reviews. Many online stores have made efforts to increase perceived social presence of their customers through customer reviews, recommender systems, and analyzing associations among products. Primarily because social presence can increase customer trust or reuse intention for online stores. However, there were few studies that investigated the interactions between recommendation type, product type and provision of customer product reviews on social presence. Therefore, one of the purposes of this study is to identify the effects of personalized recommender systems and compare the role of customer reviews with product types. This study performed an experiment to see these interactions. Experimental web pages were developed with $2{\times}2$ factorial setting based on how to provide social presence to users with customer reviews and two product types such as hedonic and utilitarian. The hedonic type was a ringtone chosen from Nate.com while the utilitarian was a TOEIC study aid book selected from Yes24.com. To conduct the experiment, web based experiments were conducted for the participants who have been shopping on the online stores. Participants were a total of 240 and 30% of the participants had the chance of getting the presents. We found out that social presence increased for hedonic products when personalized recommendations were given compared to non.personalized recommendations. Although providing customer reviews for two product types did not significantly increase social presence, provision of customer product reviews for hedonic (ringtone) increased perceived social presence. Otherwise, provision of customer product reviews could not increase social presence when the systems recommend utilitarian products (TOEIC study.aid books). Therefore, it appears that the effects of increasing perceived social presence with customer reviews have a difference for product types. In short, the role of customer reviews could be different based on which product types were considered by customers when they are making a decision related to purchasing on the online stores. Additionally, there were no differences for increasing perceived social presence when providing customer reviews. Our participants might have focused on how recommendations had been provided and what products were recommended because our developed systems were providing recommendations after participants rating their preferences. Thus, the effects of customer reviews could appear more clearly if our participants had actual purchase opportunity for the recommendations. Personalized recommender systems can increase social presence of customers more than nonpersonalized recommender systems by using user preference. Online stores could find out how they can increase perceived social presence and satisfaction of their customers when customers want to find the proper products with recommender systems and customer reviews. In addition, the role of customer reviews of the personalized recommendations can be different based on types of the recommended products. Even if this study conducted two product types such as hedonic and utilitarian, the results revealed that customer reviews for hedonic increased social presence of customers more than customer reviews for utilitarian. Thus, online stores need to consider the role of providing customer reviews with highly personalized information based on their product types when they develop the personalized recommender systems.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.247-264
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• 2016

With the rapid acceleration of low-birth rate and population aging, the employment of the neglected groups of people including the middle aged class is a crucial issue in South Korea. In particular, in the 2010s, the number of the middle aged who want to find a new job after retirement age is significantly increasing with the arrival of the retirement time of the baby boom generation (born 1955-1963). Despite the importance of matching jobs to this emerging middle aged class, private job portals as well as the Korean government do not provide any online job service tailored for them. A gigantic amount of job information is available online; however, the current recruiting systems do not meet the demand of the middle aged class as their primary targets are young workers. We are in dire need of a specially designed recruiting system for the middle aged. Meanwhile, when users are searching the desired occupations on the Worknet website, provided by the Korean Ministry of Employment and Labor, users are experiencing discomfort to search for similar jobs because Worknet is providing filtered search results on the basis of exact matches of a preferred job code. Besides, according to our Worknet data analysis, only about 24% of job seekers had landed on a job position consistent with their initial preferred job code while the rest had landed on a position different from their initial preference. To improve the situation, particularly for the middle aged class, we investigate a soft job matching technique by performing the following: 1) we review a user behavior logs of Worknet, which is a public job recruiting system set up by the Korean government and point out key system design implications for the middle aged. Specifically, we analyze the job postings that include preferential tags for the middle aged in order to disclose what types of jobs are in favor of the middle aged; 2) we develope a new occupation classification scheme for the middle aged, Korea Occupation Classification for the Middle-aged (KOCM), based on the similarity between jobs by reorganizing and modifying a general occupation classification scheme. When viewed from the perspective of job placement, an occupation classification scheme is a way to connect the enterprises and job seekers and a basic mechanism for job placement. The key features of KOCM include establishing the Simple Labor category, which is the most requested category by enterprises; and 3) we design MOMA (Middle-aged Occupation Matching Algorithm), which is a hybrid job matching algorithm comprising constraint-based reasoning and case-based reasoning. MOMA incorporates KOCM to expand query to search similar jobs in the database. MOMA utilizes cosine similarity between user requirement and job posting to rank a set of postings in terms of preferred job code, salary, distance, and job type. The developed system using MOMA demonstrates about 20 times of improvement over the hard matching performance. In implementing the algorithm for a web-based application of recruiting system for the middle aged, we also considered the usability issue of making the system easier to use, which is especially important for this particular class of users. That is, we wanted to improve the usability of the system during the job search process for the middle aged users by asking to enter only a few simple and core pieces of information such as preferred job (job code), salary, and (allowable) distance to the working place, enabling the middle aged to find a job suitable to their needs efficiently. The Web site implemented with MOMA should be able to contribute to improving job search of the middle aged class. We also expect the overall approach to be applicable to other groups of people for the improvement of job matching results.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.89-105
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• 2014

After emergence of Internet, social media with highly interactive Web 2.0 applications has provided very user friendly means for consumers and companies to communicate with each other. Users have routinely published contents involving their opinions and interests in social media such as blogs, forums, chatting rooms, and discussion boards, and the contents are released real-time in the Internet. For that reason, many researchers and marketers regard social media contents as the source of information for business analytics to develop business insights, and many studies have reported results on mining business intelligence from Social media content. In particular, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, as a technique to extract, classify, understand, and assess the opinions implicit in text contents, are frequently applied into social media content analysis because it emphasizes determining sentiment polarity and extracting authors' opinions. A number of frameworks, methods, techniques and tools have been presented by these researchers. However, we have found some weaknesses from their methods which are often technically complicated and are not sufficiently user-friendly for helping business decisions and planning. In this study, we attempted to formulate a more comprehensive and practical approach to conduct opinion mining with visual deliverables. First, we described the entire cycle of practical opinion mining using Social media content from the initial data gathering stage to the final presentation session. Our proposed approach to opinion mining consists of four phases: collecting, qualifying, analyzing, and visualizing. In the first phase, analysts have to choose target social media. Each target media requires different ways for analysts to gain access. There are open-API, searching tools, DB2DB interface, purchasing contents, and so son. Second phase is pre-processing to generate useful materials for meaningful analysis. If we do not remove garbage data, results of social media analysis will not provide meaningful and useful business insights. To clean social media data, natural language processing techniques should be applied. The next step is the opinion mining phase where the cleansed social media content set is to be analyzed. The qualified data set includes not only user-generated contents but also content identification information such as creation date, author name, user id, content id, hit counts, review or reply, favorite, etc. Depending on the purpose of the analysis, researchers or data analysts can select a suitable mining tool. Topic extraction and buzz analysis are usually related to market trends analysis, while sentiment analysis is utilized to conduct reputation analysis. There are also various applications, such as stock prediction, product recommendation, sales forecasting, and so on. The last phase is visualization and presentation of analysis results. The major focus and purpose of this phase are to explain results of analysis and help users to comprehend its meaning. Therefore, to the extent possible, deliverables from this phase should be made simple, clear and easy to understand, rather than complex and flashy. To illustrate our approach, we conducted a case study on a leading Korean instant noodle company. We targeted the leading company, NS Food, with 66.5% of market share; the firm has kept No. 1 position in the Korean "Ramen" business for several decades. We collected a total of 11,869 pieces of contents including blogs, forum contents and news articles. After collecting social media content data, we generated instant noodle business specific language resources for data manipulation and analysis using natural language processing. In addition, we tried to classify contents in more detail categories such as marketing features, environment, reputation, etc. In those phase, we used free ware software programs such as TM, KoNLP, ggplot2 and plyr packages in R project. As the result, we presented several useful visualization outputs like domain specific lexicons, volume and sentiment graphs, topic word cloud, heat maps, valence tree map, and other visualized images to provide vivid, full-colored examples using open library software packages of the R project. Business actors can quickly detect areas by a swift glance that are weak, strong, positive, negative, quiet or loud. Heat map is able to explain movement of sentiment or volume in categories and time matrix which shows density of color on time periods. Valence tree map, one of the most comprehensive and holistic visualization models, should be very helpful for analysts and decision makers to quickly understand the "big picture" business situation with a hierarchical structure since tree-map can present buzz volume and sentiment with a visualized result in a certain period. This case study offers real-world business insights from market sensing which would demonstrate to practical-minded business users how they can use these types of results for timely decision making in response to on-going changes in the market. We believe our approach can provide practical and reliable guide to opinion mining with visualized results that are immediately useful, not just in food industry but in other industries as well.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.85-107
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• 2019

Online consumers browse products belonging to a particular product line or brand for purchase, or simply leave a wide range of navigation without making purchase. The research on the behavior and purchase of online consumers has been steadily progressed, and related services and applications based on behavior data of consumers have been developed in practice. In recent years, customization strategies and recommendation systems of consumers have been utilized due to the development of big data technology, and attempts are being made to optimize users' shopping experience. However, even in such an attempt, it is very unlikely that online consumers will actually be able to visit the website and switch to the purchase stage. This is because online consumers do not just visit the website to purchase products but use and browse the websites differently according to their shopping motives and purposes. Therefore, it is important to analyze various types of visits as well as visits to purchase, which is important for understanding the behaviors of online consumers. In this study, we explored the clustering analysis of session based on click stream data of e-commerce company in order to explain diversity and complexity of search behavior of online consumers and typified search behavior. For the analysis, we converted data points of more than 8 million pages units into visit units' sessions, resulting in a total of over 500,000 website visit sessions. For each visit session, 12 characteristics such as page view, duration, search diversity, and page type concentration were extracted for clustering analysis. Considering the size of the data set, we performed the analysis using the Mini-Batch K-means algorithm, which has advantages in terms of learning speed and efficiency while maintaining the clustering performance similar to that of the clustering algorithm K-means. The most optimized number of clusters was derived from four, and the differences in session unit characteristics and purchasing rates were identified for each cluster. The online consumer visits the website several times and learns about the product and decides the purchase. In order to analyze the purchasing process over several visits of the online consumer, we constructed the visiting sequence data of the consumer based on the navigation patterns in the web site derived clustering analysis. The visit sequence data includes a series of visiting sequences until one purchase is made, and the items constituting one sequence become cluster labels derived from the foregoing. We have separately established a sequence data for consumers who have made purchases and data on visits for consumers who have only explored products without making purchases during the same period of time. And then sequential pattern mining was applied to extract frequent patterns from each sequence data. The minimum support is set to 10%, and frequent patterns consist of a sequence of cluster labels. While there are common derived patterns in both sequence data, there are also frequent patterns derived only from one side of sequence data. We found that the consumers who made purchases through the comparative analysis of the extracted frequent patterns showed the visiting pattern to decide to purchase the product repeatedly while searching for the specific product. The implication of this study is that we analyze the search type of online consumers by using large - scale click stream data and analyze the patterns of them to explain the behavior of purchasing process with data-driven point. Most studies that typology of online consumers have focused on the characteristics of the type and what factors are key in distinguishing that type. In this study, we carried out an analysis to type the behavior of online consumers, and further analyzed what order the types could be organized into one another and become a series of search patterns. In addition, online retailers will be able to try to improve their purchasing conversion through marketing strategies and recommendations for various types of visit and will be able to evaluate the effect of the strategy through changes in consumers' visit patterns.