• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.129-142
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• 2016

Customer product reviews have become one of the important factors for purchase decision makings. Customers believe that reviews written by others who have already had an experience with the product offer more reliable information than that provided by sellers. However, there are too many products and reviews, the advantage of e-commerce can be overwhelmed by increasing search costs. Reading all of the reviews to find out the pros and cons of a certain product can be exhausting. To help users find the most useful information about products without much difficulty, e-commerce companies try to provide various ways for customers to write and rate product reviews. To assist potential customers, online stores have devised various ways to provide useful customer reviews. Different methods have been developed to classify and recommend useful reviews to customers, primarily using feedback provided by customers about the helpfulness of reviews. Most shopping websites provide customer reviews and offer the following information: the average preference of a product, the number of customers who have participated in preference voting, and preference distribution. Most information on the helpfulness of product reviews is collected through a voting system. Amazon.com asks customers whether a review on a certain product is helpful, and it places the most helpful favorable and the most helpful critical review at the top of the list of product reviews. Some companies also predict the usefulness of a review based on certain attributes including length, author(s), and the words used, publishing only reviews that are likely to be useful. Text mining approaches have been used for classifying useful reviews in advance. To apply a text mining approach based on all reviews for a product, we need to build a term-document matrix. We have to extract all words from reviews and build a matrix with the number of occurrences of a term in a review. Since there are many reviews, the size of term-document matrix is so large. It caused difficulties to apply text mining algorithms with the large term-document matrix. Thus, researchers need to delete some terms in terms of sparsity since sparse words have little effects on classifications or predictions. The purpose of this study is to suggest a better way of building term-document matrix by deleting useless terms for review classification. In this study, we propose neutrality index to select words to be deleted. Many words still appear in both classifications - useful and not useful - and these words have little or negative effects on classification performances. Thus, we defined these words as neutral terms and deleted neutral terms which are appeared in both classifications similarly. After deleting sparse words, we selected words to be deleted in terms of neutrality. We tested our approach with Amazon.com's review data from five different product categories: Cellphones & Accessories, Movies & TV program, Automotive, CDs & Vinyl, Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry. We used reviews which got greater than four votes by users and 60% of the ratio of useful votes among total votes is the threshold to classify useful and not-useful reviews. We randomly selected 1,500 useful reviews and 1,500 not-useful reviews for each product category. And then we applied Information Gain and Support Vector Machine algorithms to classify the reviews and compared the classification performances in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure. Though the performances vary according to product categories and data sets, deleting terms with sparsity and neutrality showed the best performances in terms of F-measure for the two classification algorithms. However, deleting terms with sparsity only showed the best performances in terms of Recall for Information Gain and using all terms showed the best performances in terms of precision for SVM. Thus, it needs to be careful for selecting term deleting methods and classification algorithms based on data sets.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.173-195
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• 2020

Purpose The purpose of this study is to verify the effect of reviewer's attributes on review usefulness while exploring the variables that can moderate the relationship between reviewer's attributes and review usefulness through empirical analysis. Design/methodology/approach To understand the impact of online reviewer profiles on review usefulness and how these impacts change, this study collected more than 30,000 online reviews of restaurants through TripAdvisor.com, that is a representative OTA shares tourism information. We analyze the moderating effects of four variables such as review length, review equivocality, review uncertainty, and review readability. Findings According to the empirical analysis result, this study reveals that the reviewer's profile attribute can significantly improve the review usefulness of the reviewer, and confirmed the moderating effect of the review's attribute(Review length, Equivocality, Uncertainty, Readability).

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.43-61
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• 2016

Customer reviews help potential customers make purchasing decisions. However, the prevalence of reviews on websites push the customer to sift through them and change the focus from a mere search to identifying which of the available reviews are valuable and useful for the purchasing decision at hand. To identify useful reviews, websites have developed different mechanisms to give customers options when evaluating existing reviews. Websites allow users to rate the usefulness of a customer review as helpful or not. Amazon.com uses a ratio-type helpfulness, while Yelp.com uses a count-type usefulness index. This usefulness index provides helpful reviews to future potential purchasers. This study investigated the effects of sentiment and readability on useful votes for customer reviews. Similar studies on the relationship between sentiment and readability have focused on the ratio-type usefulness index utilized by websites such as Amazon.com. In this study, Yelp.com's count-type usefulness index for restaurant reviews was used to investigate the relationship between sentiment/readability and usefulness votes. Yelp.com's online customer reviews for stores in the beverage and food categories were used for the analysis. In total, 170,294 reviews containing information on a store's reputation and popularity were used. The control variables were the review length, store reputation, and popularity; the independent variables were the sentiment and readability, while the dependent variable was the number of helpful votes. The review rating is the moderating variable for the review sentiment and readability. The length is the number of characters in a review. The popularity is the number of reviews for a store, and the reputation is the general average rating of all reviews for a store. The readability of a review was calculated with the Coleman-Liau index. The sentiment is a positivity score for the review as calculated by SentiWordNet. The review rating is a preference score selected from 1 to 5 (stars) by the review author. The dependent variable (i.e., usefulness votes) used in this study is a count variable. Therefore, the Poisson regression model, which is commonly used to account for the discrete and nonnegative nature of count data, was applied in the analyses. The increase in helpful votes was assumed to follow a Poisson distribution. Because the Poisson model assumes an equal mean and variance and the data were over-dispersed, a negative binomial distribution model that allows for over-dispersion of the count variable was used for the estimation. Zero-inflated negative binomial regression was used to model count variables with excessive zeros and over-dispersed count outcome variables. With this model, the excess zeros were assumed to be generated through a separate process from the count values and therefore should be modeled as independently as possible. The results showed that positive sentiment had a negative effect on gaining useful votes for positive reviews but no significant effect on negative reviews. Poor readability had a negative effect on gaining useful votes and was not moderated by the review star ratings. These findings yield considerable managerial implications. The results are helpful for online websites when analyzing their review guidelines and identifying useful reviews for their business. Based on this study, positive reviews are not necessarily helpful; therefore, restaurants should consider which type of positive review is helpful for their business. Second, this study is beneficial for businesses and website designers in creating review mechanisms to know which type of reviews to highlight on their websites and which type of reviews can be beneficial to the business. Moreover, this study highlights the review systems employed by websites to allow their customers to post rating reviews.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.80-91
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• 2017

The purpose of paper is to confirm the role of E-WOM(Electronic Worth of Mouth) in decision making of selecting the mobile application via smart-phone or tablet pc. Particularly i wished to confirm the effects of others' positive or negative reviews in purchasing(free downloading) mobile applications. To resolve these research questions, the secondary data or previous research were collected and arranged theoretically. From literature research, i made out the proposed model to explain the relationships between the variables, executed the operational definitions and 14 Hypotheses were established, collected the survey data of 228 mobile application users. Using the empirical test analysis, previous performances to confirm the construct validity and internal consistency and PLS(Partial Least Square) modelling method was executed. The test result showed that proposed relations of variables was empirically identified, therefore, i got the conclusion as followings; First, attributes of mobile application users' reviews have the effects positively to usefulness perception and expected performance. Second, it was significantly tested Usefulness of Online Review and Expected Performance. Second, Usefulness of Online Review, Source Credibility and Expected Performance have effect positively to Intention of Review Adoption.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.29-56
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• 2021

Recently, various types of products have been launched with the rapid growth of the e-commerce market. As a result, many users face information overload problems, which is time-consuming in the purchasing decision-making process. Therefore, the importance of a personalized recommendation service that can provide customized products and services to users is emerging. For example, global companies such as Netflix, Amazon, and Google have introduced personalized recommendation services to support users' purchasing decisions. Accordingly, the user's information search cost can reduce which can positively affect the company's sales increase. The existing personalized recommendation service research applied Collaborative Filtering (CF) technique predicts user preference mainly use quantified information. However, the recommendation performance may have decreased if only use quantitative information. To improve the problems of such existing studies, many studies using reviews to enhance recommendation performance. However, reviews contain factors that hinder purchasing decisions, such as advertising content, false comments, meaningless or irrelevant content. When providing recommendation service uses a review that includes these factors can lead to decrease recommendation performance. Therefore, we proposed a novel recommendation methodology through CNN-based review usefulness score prediction to improve these problems. The results show that the proposed methodology has better prediction performance than the recommendation method considering all existing preference ratings. In addition, the results suggest that can enhance the performance of traditional CF when the information on review usefulness reflects in the personalized recommendation service.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.31-49
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• 2023

TikTok, as a leading short video platform, has attracted many users, and the resulting attention generates immense business value as a platform to diffuse knowledge. As a qualitative and explorative approach, this study reviews the knowledge payment industry and discusses the influential factors of users' payment decisions regarding knowledge products on TikTok. By conducting in-depth interviews with ten participants and observing 95 knowledge providers' videos, we find that TikTok has significant business potential in the knowledge payment industry. By using the ATLAS. ti software to code the data collected from these interviews, this study finds that demander characteristics (personal needs), product characteristics (product quality), provider characteristics (the key opinion leader effect), and platform characteristics (platform management) are the four core categories that influence users' payment decisions regarding knowledge products on TikTok. A theoretical model consisting of the ten variables of emotional needs, professional needs, quality, price, helpfulness, value, charisma, user trust, service guarantee, and scarcity is proposed based on the grounded theory. The theoretical and practical implications of the study findings are also discussed.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.311-328
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• 2022

Because of the spread of smartphones due to the development of information and communication technology, online shopping mall services can be used on computers and mobile devices. As a result, the number of users using the online shopping mall service increases rapidly, and the types of products traded are also growing. Therefore, to maximize profits, companies need to provide information that may interest users. To this end, the recommendation system presents necessary information or products to the user based on the user's past behavioral data or behavioral purchase records. Representative overseas companies that currently provide recommendation services include Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube. These companies support users' purchase decisions by recommending products to users using ratings, purchase records, and clickstream data that users give to the items. In addition, users refer to the ratings left by other users about the product before buying a product. Most users tend to provide ratings only to products they are satisfied with, and the higher the rating, the higher the purchase intention. And recently, e-commerce sites have provided users with the ability to vote on whether product reviews are helpful. Through this, the user makes a purchase decision by referring to reviews and ratings of products judged to be beneficial. Therefore, in this study, the correlation between the product rating and the helpful information of the review is identified. The valuable data of the evaluation is reflected in the recommendation system to check the recommendation performance. In addition, we want to compare the results of skipping all the ratings in the traditional collaborative filtering technique with the recommended performance results that reflect only the 4 and 5 ratings. For this purpose, electronic product data collected from Amazon was used in this study, and the experimental results confirmed a correlation between ratings and review usefulness information. In addition, as a result of comparing the recommendation performance by reflecting all the ratings and only the 4 and 5 points in the recommendation system, the recommendation performance of remembering only the 4 and 5 points in the recommendation system was higher. In addition, as a result of reflecting review usefulness information in the recommendation system, it was confirmed that the more valuable the review, the higher the recommendation performance. Therefore, these experimental results are expected to improve the performance of personalized recommendation services in the future and provide implications for e-commerce sites.