In this paper, we propose a novel approach of vector quantization using a merge-based hierarchical neural network. Vector quantization¡]VQ¡^is known as a very useful technique for lossy data compression. Recently, Neural network¡]NN¡^algorithms have been used for VQ. Vlajic and Card proposed a modified adaptive resonance theory (modified ART2¡^[1] which is a constructing tree structure clustering method. However, modified ART2 has disadvantages of slow construction rate and constructing many redundant levels. Therefore, we propose a more efficient approach for constructing the tree in this paper. Our method establishes only those required levels without losing the fidelity of a compressed image.

As a single English word can have several different meanings, a single meaning can be expressed by several different English words. The meaning of a word depends on the sense intended. Thus to select the most appropriate meaning for an ambiguous word within a context is a critical problem for the applications using the technologies of natural language processing. However, at present, most word sense disambiguation methods either disambiguate only restricted parts of speech words such as only nouns or the accuracy in disambiguating word senses is not satisfiable. The ambiguous situation often bothers users. In this study, a new word sense disambiguation method using WordNet lexicon database, SemCor text files, and the Web is presented. In addition to nouns, the proposed method also attempts to disambiguate verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in sentences. The text files and sentences investigated in the experiments were randomly selected from SemCor. The semantic similarity between the senses of individually semantically ambiguous words in a word pair is measured to select the applicable candidate senses of a target word in that word pair. By a synonym weighting method, the possible sense diversity in synonym sets is considered based on the synonym sets WordNet provides. Thus corresponding synonym sets of the candidate senses are determined. The candidate senses expanded with the senses in the corresponding synonym sets, and enhanced by the context window technique form new queries. After the new queries are submitted to a search engine to search for the matching documents on the Web, the candidate senses are ranked by the number of the matching documents found. The first sense in the list of the ranked candidate senses is viewed as the most appropriate sense of the target word. The proposed method as well as Stetina et al.¡¦s and Mihalcea et al.¡¦s methods are evaluated based on the SemCor text files. The experimental results show that for the top sense selected this method having the average accuracy of disambiguating word senses with 81.3% for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs is slightly better than Stetina et al.¡¦s method of 80% and Mihalcea et al.¡¦s method of 80.1%. Furthermore, the proposed method is the only method with the accuracy of disambiguating word senses for verbs achieving 70% for the top one sense selected. Moreover, for the top three senses selected this method is superior to the other two methods by an average accuracy of the four parts of speech exceeding 96%. It is expected that the proposed method can improve the performance of the word sense disambiguation applications in machine translation, document classification, or information retrieval.

This research investigates how different types of electronic word-of-mouth affect consumer¡¦s attitude and purchase intention. Using the product types drafted by Ratchford (1987¡^as the moderating variable, this research explores the relation between different types of electronic word-of-mouth and consumers¡¦ product attitude and purchase intention. Ratchford (1987) divided the products into four categories along two dimensions, the consumer ¡§involvement¡¨ and ¡§rational vs affective¡¨ attitude. An experimental study was conducted using electronic word-of-mouth collected from Internet group discussion forums to find how different types of electronic word-of-mouth (product introduction, positive reviews and negative reviews) affected consumer¡¦s attitude and behavior. The results indicate that the nature of electronic word-of-mouth did affect consumer attitude toward the product and purchase intention. Major observations include the following: 1. Negative electronic word-of-mouth has resulted in lower attitude and purchase intention for ¡§Low involvement¡¨ product. 2. No significant difference exists between different types of electronic word-of-mouth for ¡§High involvement¡¨ product. 3. For ¡§Rational product¡¨, neutral message that only provided product description¡¨ turned out to create higher satisfaction, while positive and negative word-of-mouth had no significant effect on consumer attitude and purchase intention. 4. For ¡§Affective product¡¨, positive electronic word-of-mouth has more satisfaction on the consumer¡¦s attitude and purchase intention.

This thesis aims to find out how animacy affects sentence structure choice in Turkish learners of L2 English. The study compares three different L2 English proficiency levels with each other as well to L1 English and L1 Turkish. In this way the effect of English, a rigid word order language, and Turkish, a free word order language on sentence structure choice have been compared. A picture description task was applied on 94 participants. The pictures depicted a transitive action taking place between an inanimate agent and an animate patient (animate condition) or between an inanimate agent and an inanimate patient. The subjects were given handouts with the pictures and were asked to write down what is happening in each picture. There were 60 Turkish learners of L2 English and 14 English participants in the study. Turkish learners of English belonged to level-1 (16 students), level-2 (25 students) and level-3 (19 students). In addition, 20 Turkish speakers were consulted for their knowledge of Turkish. It was hypothesized that in L2 English, animate entities would be accessed first and this will directly affect sentence structure choice through grammatical subject assignment or through word order. Thus, it was expected that when the learners are shown a picture depicting a transitive action taking place between an animate patinet and an inanimate agent, they would tend to use the passive in English, which assigns both a sentence-initial position and a subjecthood role to the animate entity. L2 proficiency level and native language were expected to play a role in determining the role of animacy on sentence structure choice. Chi-square analysis and odds ratio calculations were made. The results showed that animacy of the patinet affected sentence structure choice in L2 English by triggering the passivce usage in only level-3 (the most advanced group). Animacy of the patient affected native speakers of English in the same way, i.e. native English speakers tended to use the passive voice in the animate condition. No such effect was found in lower level learners of L2 English (i.e. level-1 and level-2) and Turkish native speakers. It was found that in the animate condition, Turkish native speakers tended to use the OSV word order more frequently than they did in the inanimate condition. This result suggested that in Turkish, animacy of the patient triggers the use of the OSV (Object, Subject, Verb) order rather than the passive voice. In short, the research results suggested that L2 proficency level and native language could play a role in determining how animacy affects sentence structure choice in L2.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of Anglicisms in the language of Ukrainian young adults, the motives of English borrowings&rsquo / usage, and the attitude of young people towards the presence of Anglicisms in the Ukrainian language. The study examined the language of young adults, newspapers and magazines, and popular TV programmes. Note fields, audio-recordings, and questionnaire were chosen for investigation of borrowings integrated in the Ukrainian language. The study revealed a constant usage of Anglicisms by young adults in Ukraine, despite their place of residence and occupation, focusing on the main areas where borrowings are used. It was suggested that English borrowings have become a significant part of the language used by young people in Ukraine.

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It grows rapidly the global men ¡¦s skin care market in developed country. There are 1 billion market size which represent s 40% to 60 % growth in the men¡¦s skin care market in Taiwan since year of 2005 . It also motivates the Word-of -Mouth market ing when the commercial advertisement has been skipped by end consumers times and times again . There are all kinds of updated word-of-mouth marketing develop ed such as: @WOM, Viral marketing, Blog marketing. It is a case to leverage the word -of-mouth marketing in brand building for a pure Men¡¦s skin care brand . This study is to explore the key successful factors for appling the Word-Of-Mouth marketing within a new market, especialy for an independent men¡¦s skin care brand. There are interview s for brand-owner and on-line ¡Vretailer, and questionary for consumers in this project. The first finding is that men ¡¦s skin care concept is more acceptable than before . It becomes more popular to purchase the products by men¡¦s their own. Further more, men start to try the suncare and anti -oil products in the ir daily regimen. However, female is still playing the key roll in decision making for her boy friend or families. We also found, the female rarely know n the difference between men¡¦s and women¡¦s skin care regimen. Even she might be an expertise in her own skin care needs. As a result, we should provide the free sample with ¡§You must know information¡¨ to the key person, SHE, then influent her boy friend and families. It is how we differentiate the independent men¡¦s skin care brand. The second finding is most of the heavy internet users are the followers; they are not interested in the men¡¦s skin care information. Therefore, it is hardly to trigger off the tipping point if we target the male as early adaptor via @WOM. In another words, we can not exect a big boom if the @WOM didn¡¦t reach women. In summary, the word-of-mouth marketing for men¡¦s skin care brand, first thing is to create the truly words via the early users, the men who already experienced the oil-control product and/or suncare products. The secondary is to broadcast the words from early users thru @WOM, PR exposures, free samples to reach women as sneezers. The last, to roll out a new topic ensure the on going spreading for brands every 12 weeks.

In a democratic society, the number of public opinion documents increase with days, and there is a pressing need for automatically classifying these documents. Traditional approach for classifying documents involves the techniques of segmenting words and the use of stop words, corpus, and grammar analysis for retrieving the key terms of documents. However, with the emergence of new terms, the traditional methods that leverage dictionary or thesaurus may incur lower accuracy. Therefore, this study proposes a new method that does not require the prior establishment of a dictionary or thesaurus, and is applicable to documents written in any language and documents containing unstructured text. Specifically, the classification method employs genetic algorithm for achieving this goal. In this method, each training document is represented by several chromosomes, and based on the gene values of these chromosomes, the characteristic terms of the document are determined. The fitness function, which is required by the genetic algorithm for evaluating the fitness of an evolved chromosome, considers the similarity to the chromosomes of documents of other types. This study used data FAQ of e-mail box of Taipei city mayor for evaluating the proposed method by varying the length of documents. The results show that the proposed method achieves the average accuracy rate of 89%, the average precision rate of 47%, and the average recall rate of 45%. In addition, F-measure can reach up to 0.7. The results confirms that the number of training documents, content of training documents, the similarity between the types of documents, and the length of the documents all contribute to the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Word of mouth has been playing an essential role while consumers make their purchase decision since ever, and its diffusion is becoming much faster via the internet nowadays. Surfing the internet gathering information before making the purchase, the so-called ¡uWisdom of Crowds¡vshopping pattern is taking its shape and possibly going to become the main trend in the future. Thus, electronic word of mouth does play an important part during the process of consumers¡¦ decision making, and more and more consumers start to ponder what to believe on the internet. As a result, trust is becoming the key factor if the consumers can take electronic word of mouth into their consideration or not. This research discusses how message sideness appeal and emotion in electronic word of mouth affect consumers¡¦ trust under a positively framed message and a negative framed message. This research adopts experimental method, distributes questionnaire and analyze the data with SPSS12.0. The results present message sideness appeal and emotion have impacts on consumers¡¦ trust. Two-sided appeal can cause higher consumers¡¦ trust than one-sided appeal whether under a positively framed message or a negative framed message. Emotion also plays an important part between message sideness and consumers¡¦ trust during the process of diffusion of electronic word of mouth. The results can not only help the word-of-mouth senders to develop an appropriate writing pattern to make electronic word of mouth more credible and effective, but also provide the business a brand-new point of view and some practical suggestions to develop a new marketing strategy.

Traditionally speaking, some firms believe that great brand awareness will affect consumers¡¦ purchasing intention and bring much more profit in returns. Hence, a large number of entrepreneurs are spending a tremendous amount of capital on enhancing their brands and brand awareness but they often ignore the importance of word-of-mouth communication on internet. Recently, the internet has become much more popular and common than decades ago and such channel has changed consumers¡¦ purchasing habits. In fact, there are more consumers who share their experience on those products and services that they have used through internet. Furthermore, there are also more consumers who use internet to receive the information that they need for specific products and services. Thus, the importance and effectiveness of ¡§word-of-month of communication¡¨ on internet are much more important than the traditional ¡§word-of-mouth communication¡¨. This research study will be focused on hotels in Kenting area to discuss the effectiveness of purchasing intentions based on the brand awareness of that hotel and messages from the word-of-mouth communication on internet. More importantly, this research study will use customers¡¦ involvement as moderators to further understand the relationships between brand awareness & purchasing intentions, and word-of-mouth communication on internet & purchasing intentions. This research study has chosen two hotels in Kenting area. One hotel has high brand awareness while the other one has low brand awareness. This dissertation has also conducted on-line research based on their word-of-mouth communication on internet and the questionnaire participants are customers who have been to Kenting hotels. After collecting all data, this research has discovered that a hotel¡¦s brand awareness will affect customers¡¦ purchasing intentions. In other words, higher the brand awareness, more purchasing intentions from consumers. In addition, messages from word-of-mouth communication on internet will also affect customers¡¦ purchasing intentions. When the word-of-mouth communication on internet is negative, there will be fewer customers with lower purchasing intentions. Yet, the messages from word-of-mouth communication on internet will have higher effectiveness than the brand awareness of that specific hotel. Nevertheless, consumers¡¦ involvement will not affect the brand awareness, word-of-mouth communication on internet, and purchasing intentions. Last, the conclusion of this research study will provide some practical recommendations for hotel owners. Key words: brand awareness, word-of-mouth on internet, customers¡¦ involvement, and purchasing intentions.