The prediction of pre-election polls is an issue of concern for both politicians and voters. The Taiwan nine-in-one election held in 2014 ended with jaw-dropping results;…
Abstract
Purpose
The prediction of pre-election polls is an issue of concern for both politicians and voters. The Taiwan nine-in-one election held in 2014 ended with jaw-dropping results; apparently, traditional polls did not work well. As a remedy to this problem, the purpose of this paper is to utilize the comments posted on social media to analyze civilians’ views on the two candidates for mayor of Taichung City, Chih-chiang Hu, and Chia-Lung Lin.
Design/methodology/approach
After conducting word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging for the collected reviews, this study constructs the opinion phrase extraction rules for identifying the opinion words associated with the attribute words. Next, this study classifies the attribute words into six municipal governance-related topics and calculates the opinion scores for each candidate. Finally, this study uses correspondence analysis to transform opinion information on the candidates into a graphical display to facilitate the interpretation of voters’ views.
Findings
The results show that the topics of candidates’ backgrounds and transport infrastructure were the two most critical factors for the election prediction. Based on the predication, Lin outscores Hu by 17.74 percent which is close to the real election results.
Research limitations/implications
This study proposes new rules for the extraction of Chinese opinion words associated with attribute words.
Practical implications
This study applies Chinese semantic analysis to assist in predicting election results and investigating the topics of concern to voters.
Originality/value
The proposed opinion phrase extraction rules for Chinese social media, as well as the election forecast process, can provide valuable references for political parties and candidates to plan better nomination and election strategies.
Details
Keywords
Jia-Yen Huang and Shih-Tian Siao
This paper aims to propose an integrated bionic optimal design system to assist engineers in bionic design tasks. In this age of ecological awareness and sustainability, engineers…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to propose an integrated bionic optimal design system to assist engineers in bionic design tasks. In this age of ecological awareness and sustainability, engineers are increasingly applying bionics to their product designs. A recent surge of research on bionics has presented new opportunities and challenges. To deal with these challenges, an integrated design system equipped with the capabilities of conducting biologically inspired design, solving technical contradictions, optimizing design parameters and verifying design effectiveness is required.
Design/methodology/approach
This study proposes a two-level analysis to help decision makers conduct multi-faceted observation and assessment on conceptual bionic design. The contradictions incurred when transferring biological principals to engineering design are solved using BioTRIZ, and the conceptual design is then created. This study conducts computer-aided engineering analysis, incorporating the Taguchi method and TOPSIS method, to obtain the optimal design of bionic products.
Findings
The proposed design process focuses on improving the product structure instead of changing the materials, and thus, the authors are able to put the goals of saving energy, environmental protection and sustainability into practice.
Practical implications
Through the design and analysis processes, the authors prove that their designed bionic-fan can effectively enhance operational efficiency and reduce the aerodynamic noise. The system can provide a practical tool for engineers intending to accomplish complete designs and verifications using bionics.
Originality/value
Most existing design methodologies that have attempted to combine biology with engineering design have fallen short in their level of thoroughness. This study proposes a complete bionic design system by integrating the processes of bionic-inspired design, optimization and verification.
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Keywords
It is not uncommon that a multi‐branch firm has all its branches maintaining the same group of machines from a maintenance department. Clearly there are potential opportunities to…
Abstract
Purpose
It is not uncommon that a multi‐branch firm has all its branches maintaining the same group of machines from a maintenance department. Clearly there are potential opportunities to reduce costs by coordinating the joint maintenance among the branches. The purpose of this paper is to optimally coordinate the maintenance schedule of machines of multi‐branch firms to save the maintenance cost incurred.
Design/methodology/approach
A search algorithm is proposed that proceeds the searching through the junction points within the lower and upper bounds of the search range. An example is given to illustrate the method.
Findings
The optimality structure of this problem is explored and it is asserted that the optimal cost is piece‐wise convex. Based on theoretical results, an effective search algorithm is derived that can efficiently determine the maintenance frequencies for a family of machines of multi‐branch firm.
Practical implications
A well‐planned maintenance schedule can not only bring down the cost but also raise the utilization rate of a family of machines. Numerical results show that the whole maintenance system can obtain significant cost savings from the coordination policy.
Originality/value
In response to branches adopting coordinated maintenances, the maintenance manager providing the maintenances to the branches faces a scheduling problem of how to minimize its total costs. This is an area that has received little attention in the literature. By utilizing the theoretical results, an efficient search algorithm that solves the optimal solution for this problem is proposed.
Details
Keywords
Yung-Ting Chuang and Yi-Hsi Chen
The purpose of this paper is to apply social network analysis (SNA) to study faculty research productivity, to identify key leaders, to study publication keywords and research…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to apply social network analysis (SNA) to study faculty research productivity, to identify key leaders, to study publication keywords and research areas and to visualize international collaboration patterns and analyze collaboration research fields from all Management Information System (MIS) departments in Taiwan from 1982 to 2015.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors first retrieved results encompassing about 1,766 MIS professors and their publication records between 1982 and 2015 from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST) website. Next, the authors merged these publication records with the records obtained from the Web of Science, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Airiti Library and Springer Link databases. The authors further applied six network centrality equations, leadership index, exponential weighted moving average (EWMA), contribution value and k-means clustering algorithms to analyze the collaboration patterns, research productivity and publication patterns. Finally, the authors applied D3.js to visualize the faculty members' international collaborations from all MIS departments in Taiwan.
Findings
The authors have first identified important scholars or leaders in the network. The authors also see that most MIS scholars in Taiwan tend to publish their papers in the journals such as Decision Support Systems and Information and Management. The authors have further figured out the significant scholars who have actively collaborated with academics in other countries. Furthermore, the authors have recognized the universities that have frequent collaboration with other international universities. The United States, China, Canada and the United Kingdom are the countries that have the highest numbers of collaborations with Taiwanese academics. Lastly, the keywords model, system and algorithm were the most common terms used in recent years.
Originality/value
This study applied SNA to visualize international research collaboration patterns and has revealed some salient characteristics of international cooperation trends and patterns, leadership networks and influences and research productivity for faculty in Information Management departments in Taiwan from 1982 to 2015. In addition, the authors have discovered the most common keywords used in recent years.