Is Scissoring a Metaphor for Disconnecting a Relationship?

A great deal of attention has surrounded the role of embodied cognition in human judgments; however, it has received very little research attention, especially in the marketing field. This research is based on the idea that the act of cutting can activate perceptions of severing relationships, as well as eliciting a sense of independence. Study 1 showed that consumers are less likely to adopt a close friend’s opinion when they engage in the act of cutting an object with scissors. Study 2 demonstrated that people are less likely to trust the reviews of online communities while cutting a piece of string with scissors. These lowered intentions to adopt others’ opinions appeared to be mediated by increased psychological distances between the self and the information provider. In other words, people who engage in the act of scissoring unconsciously weaken or disconnect themselves from the information providers, thereby choosing not to adopt others’ opinions. This research identifies the link between the physical activity of cutting and the mental disconnection concerning social relationships. The results provide implications in setting up an integrative framework of the consumer decision-making process involving embodied cognition.      

An Efficient Framework for Development of Task-Oriented Dialog Systems in a Smart Home Environment

In recent times, with the increasing interest in conversational agents for smart homes, task-oriented dialog systems are being actively researched. However, most of these studies are focused on the individual modules of such a system, and there is an evident lack of research on a dialog framework that can integrate and manage the entire dialog system. Therefore, in this study, we propose a framework that enables the user to effectively develop an intelligent dialog system. The proposed framework ontologically expresses the knowledge required for the task-oriented dialog system’s process and can build a dialog system by editing the dialog knowledge. In addition, the framework provides a module router that can indirectly run externally developed modules. Further, it enables a more intelligent conversation by providing a hierarchical argument structure (HAS) to manage the various argument representations included in natural language sentences. To verify the practicality of the framework, an experiment was conducted in which developers without any previous experience in developing a dialog system developed task-oriented dialog systems using the proposed framework. The experimental results show that even beginner dialog system developers can develop a high-level task-oriented dialog system

Korea's Response to COVID-19 According to Set Time Frames, With a Focus on the Network Between the Government and Responding Agencies: Social Network Analysis

BackgroundIn December 2019, COVID-19 was first confirmed in Wuhan, China, and as the respiratory disease spread around the globe, there was a spike in interest worldwide in combating such contagious diseases. When such disasters occur, the central government of South Korea and its affiliated local governments—together with nongovernmental organizations—play a crucial role in crisis management systems. ObjectiveThe purpose of this paper is to corroborate the characteristics government ministries and domestic and foreign institutions exhibit through their interconnection when the parties are undergoing a disease-related catastrophe such as the COVID-19 pandemic. MethodsUsing the social network analysis technique, the span of the COVID-19 pandemic was segmented into 3 time frames, and the relational characteristics of the COVID-19 contagious disease response department and related agencies at home and abroad were analyzed based on 3 centralities. ResultsEvidence from the second and third time frames indicates that the agents reacting to contagious diseases do not necessarily hold the central position in the network. From this, it can be inferred that it is not only the primary host that plays a pivotal role but the key to a successful response to various disasters also lies in cooperation with the relevant parties. ConclusionsThe incongruency between the findings of this paper and the existing disaster response system gives rise to the corollary that both the essential parties and the adjoining ones need to collaborate for a coordinated crisis response in disaster situations. Furthermore, much significance lies in the fact that this paper explores the various aspects that could surface among the host and relevant parties in a real-life pandemic

Lightweight Morphological Analysis Model for Smart Home Applications Based on Natural Language Interfaces

With the rapid evolution of the smart home environment, the demand for natural language processing (NLP) applications on information appliances is increasing. However, it is not easy to embed NLP-based applications in information appliances because most information appliances have hardware constraints such as small memory, limited battery capacity, and restricted processing power. In this paper, we propose a lightweight morphological analysis model, which provides the first step module of NLP for many languages. To overcome hardware constraints, the proposed model modifies a well-known left-longest-match-preference (LLMP) model and simplifies a conventional hidden Markov model (HMM). In the experiments, the proposed model exhibited good performance (a response time of 0.0195 sec per sentence, a memory usage of 1.85 MB, a precision of 92%, and a recall rate of 90%) in terms of the various evaluation measures. On the basis of these experiments, we conclude that the proposed model is suitable for natural language interfaces of information appliances with many hardware limitations because it requires less memory and consumes less battery power