Search results

Early childhood and early elementary are key times when children develop internal and external antifat attitudes; thus, it is necessary to better understand the available children’s literature around fatness.This paper aims to examine children's picture books with fat protagonists to better understand the current landscape of children's literature. Drawing on relevant literature around fat characters and the fat studies movement, this critical content analysis considers five children’s books featuring fat protagonists.

This study uses critical content analysis to analyze texts featuring fat protagonists, including two rounds of initial reading and analysis. Using lenses of critical literacy and critical multicultural analysis, the author looks for common themes, silences and absences in the texts, images and peritext.

This paper identifies themes of characters initially internalizing antifatness, then pushing back against antifat bias toward existing with joy and without stigma. Several of these texts even draw on the history of fat activism, highlighting societal critique and a potential activist component of children’s literature with fat protagonists.

The study has a small number of books, due to the limited number of texts that fit the study parameters.

The paper concludes with examples of scaffolding for teachers and parents to have conversations with young children about antifat bias while also acknowledging notable absences, particularly boy protagonists.

These themes illustrate the power of young children to push back against antifat bias and critique oppressive social structures.

There have been very few studies looking at antifatness in children’s picture books. With more books with fat protagonists coming out in the 2020s, this study offers an understanding of the themes present, while also emphasizing the need for an intersectional approach to literature with fat protagonists.

The metaverse, which is now revolutionizing how brands strategize their business needs, necessitates understanding individual opinions. Sentiment analysis deciphers emotions and uncovers a deeper understanding of user opinions and trends within this digital realm. Further, sentiments signify the underlying factor that triggers one’s intent to use technology like the metaverse. Positive sentiments often correlate with positive user experiences, while negative sentiments may signify issues or frustrations. Brands may consider these sentiments and implement them on their metaverse platforms for a seamless user experience.

The current study adopts machine learning sentiment analysis techniques using Support Vector Machine, Doc2Vec, RNN, and CNN to explore the sentiment of individuals toward metaverse in a user-generated context. The topics were discovered using the topic modeling method, and sentiment analysis was performed subsequently.

The results revealed that the users had a positive notion about the experience and orientation of the metaverse while having a negative attitude towards the economy, data, and cyber security. The accuracy of each model has been analyzed, and it has been concluded that CNN provides better accuracy on an average of 89% compared to the other models.

Analyzing sentiment can reveal how the general public perceives the metaverse. Positive sentiment may suggest enthusiasm and readiness for adoption, while negative sentiment might indicate skepticism or concerns. Given the positive user notions about the metaverse’s experience and orientation, developers should continue to focus on creating innovative and immersive virtual environments. At the same time, users' concerns about data, cybersecurity and the economy are critical. The negative attitude toward the metaverse’s economy suggests a need for innovation in economic models within the metaverse. Also, developers and platform operators should prioritize robust data security measures. Implementing strong encryption and two-factor authentication and educating users about cybersecurity best practices can address these concerns and enhance user trust.

In terms of societal dynamics, the metaverse could revolutionize communication and relationships by altering traditional notions of proximity and the presence of its users. Further, virtual economies might emerge, with virtual assets having real-world value, presenting both opportunities and challenges for industries and regulators.

The current study contributes to research as it is the first of its kind to explore the sentiments of individuals toward the metaverse using deep learning techniques and evaluate the accuracy of these models.

This study investigates the effects of vertical direction and rotation of English loan brand names in East Asian languages (Chinese and Korean) on processing fluency, perceived product quality and purchase intention.

Four experiments were conducted in China and Korea, employing a 2 (vertical direction: downward vs upward) X 3 (rotation: 0°/marquee vs 90° clockwise vs 90° counterclockwise) between-subjects factorial design.

The findings showed that when the English loan Chinese brand name was displayed downward, the marquee format was preferred, while counterclockwise rotation was favored when displayed upward. In Korean, clockwise rotation was preferred for downward presentation, while counterclockwise rotation was favored for upward presentation. The effects on purchase intention were mediated by processing fluency and perceived product quality.

This research provides practical implications for global manufacturers and retailers, offering guidance on presenting brand names in East Asian languages and optimizing product packaging designs. For Chinese consumers, the marquee format is recommended for downward-oriented brand names, while counterclockwise rotation is effective for upward orientation. For Korean consumers, clockwise rotation is favored for downward presentation and counterclockwise rotation is preferred for upward presentation. Understanding linguistic habits allows the tailoring of brand presentations, enhancing brand perception and consumer responses.

This study contributes to understanding the role of cultural and linguistic influences on consumer information processing and product perception in vertical presentations of brand names.

Sarcasm is a linguistic expression that usually carries the opposite meaning of what is being said by words, thus making it difficult for machines to discover the actual meaning. It is mainly distinguished by the inflection with which it is spoken, with an undercurrent of irony, and is largely dependent on context, which makes it a difficult task for computational analysis. Moreover, sarcasm expresses negative sentiments using positive words, allowing it to easily confuse sentiment analysis models. This paper aims to demonstrate the task of sarcasm detection using the approach of machine and deep learning.

For the purpose of sarcasm detection, machine and deep learning models were used on a data set consisting of 1.3 million social media comments, including both sarcastic and non-sarcastic comments. The data set was pre-processed using natural language processing methods, and additional features were extracted and analysed. Several machine learning models, including logistic regression, ridge regression, linear support vector and support vector machines, along with two deep learning models based on bidirectional long short-term memory and one bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT)-based model, were implemented, evaluated and compared.

The performance of machine and deep learning models was compared in the task of sarcasm detection, and possible ways of improvement were discussed. Deep learning models showed more promise, performance-wise, for this type of task. Specifically, a state-of-the-art model in natural language processing, namely, BERT-based model, outperformed other machine and deep learning models.

This study compared the performance of the various machine and deep learning models in the task of sarcasm detection using the data set of 1.3 million comments from social media.

With the rapid development of social media, the occurrence and evolution of emergency events are often accompanied by massive users' expressions. The fine-grained analysis on users' expressions can provide accurate and reliable information for event processing. Hence, 2,003,814 expressions on a major malignant emergency event were mined from multiple dimensions in this paper.

This paper conducted finer-grained analysis on users' online expressions in an emergency event. Specifically, the authors firstly selected a major emergency event as the research object and collected the event-related user expressions that lasted nearly two years to describe the dynamic evolution trend of the event. Then, users' expression preferences were identified by detecting anomic expressions, classifying sentiment tendencies and extracting topics in expressions. Finally, the authors measured the explicit and implicit impacts of different expression preferences and obtained relations between the differential expression preferences.

Experimental results showed that users have both short- and long-term attention to emergency events. Their enthusiasm for discussing the event will be quickly dispelled and easily aroused. Meanwhile, most users prefer to make rational and normative expressions of events, and the expression topics are diversified. In addition, compared with anomic negative expressions, anomic expressions in positive sentiments are more common. In conclusion, the integration of multi-dimensional analysis results of users' expression preferences (including discussion heat, preference impacts and preference relations) is an effective means to support emergency event processing.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, it is the first research to conduct in-depth and fine-grained analysis of user expression in emergencies, so as to get in-detail and multi-dimensional characteristics of users' online expressions for supporting event processing.

This article aims to help educators provide a holistic view of the LGBTQ community by highlighting children’s books that include non-parental LGBTQ characters.

The author selected over 80 children’s books honored by the American Library Association’s Rainbow Book List. Twenty-two books were analyzed that contain examples of LGBTQ adults existing beyond the homonormative nuclear family, e.g. two same-sex parents raising children.

The author discusses various ways of living represented in these books, such as chosen families, extended families, romantic partnerships and singlehood.

With the increased number of high-quality LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books published in the past decade, this study provides the foundation for educators to select various texts that reveal diverse representations of LGBTQ individuals.

Most previous studies predicting review helpfulness ignored the significance of deep features embedded in review text and instead relied on hand-crafted features. Hand-crafted and deep features have the advantages of high interpretability and predictive accuracy. This study aims to propose a novel review helpfulness prediction model that uses deep learning (DL) techniques to consider the complementarity between hand-crafted and deep features.

First, an advanced convolutional neural network was applied to extract deep features from unstructured review text. Second, this study used previous studies to extract hand-crafted features that impact the helpfulness of reviews and enhance their interpretability. Third, this study incorporated deep and hand-crafted features into a review helpfulness prediction model and evaluated its performance using the Yelp.com data set. To measure the performance of the proposed model, this study used 2,417,796 restaurant reviews.

Extensive experiments confirmed that the proposed methodology performs better than traditional machine learning methods. Moreover, this study confirms through an empirical analysis that combining hand-crafted and deep features demonstrates better prediction performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to apply DL techniques and use structured and unstructured data to predict review helpfulness in the restaurant context. In addition, an advanced feature-fusion method was adopted to better use the extracted feature information and identify the complementarity between features.

大多数先前预测评论有用性的研究忽视了嵌入在评论文本中的深层特征的重要性, 而主要依赖手工制作的特征。手工制作和深层特征具有高解释性和预测准确性的优势。本研究提出了一种新颖的评论有用性预测模型, 利用深度学习技术来考虑手工制作特征和深层特征之间的互补性。

首先, 采用先进的卷积神经网络从非结构化的评论文本中提取深层特征。其次, 本研究利用先前研究中提取的手工制作特征, 这些特征影响了评论的有用性并增强了其解释性。第三, 本研究将深层特征和手工制作特征结合到一个评论有用性预测模型中, 并使用Yelp.com数据集对其性能进行评估。为了衡量所提出模型的性能, 本研究使用了2,417,796条餐厅评论。

广泛的实验验证了所提出的方法优于传统的机器学习方法。此外, 通过实证分析, 本研究证实了结合手工制作和深层特征可以展现出更好的预测性能。

据我们所知, 这是首个在餐厅评论预测中应用深度学习技术, 并结合了结构化和非结构化数据来预测评论有用性的研究之一。此外, 本研究采用了先进的特征融合方法, 更好地利用了提取的特征信息, 并识别了特征之间的互补性。

This chapter presents a methodological discussion about ethnographic practice from a feminist perspective that contributes to the field of communication studies methodology and theory. The ethnography engages Black (Afro-Brasileiro and African-American) and economically disadvantaged youth from Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and New Orleans (USA) regarding their strategies of social and media visibility. This multi-sited ethnography proposes to improve the objectives of ethnography through theoretical flexibility, liberation from a priori assumptions, greater representation of the voices of community members, disavowal of the imperatives of positivist work, and abiding respect for the “other.”

Given the critical role of user-generated content (UGC) in e-commerce, exploring various aspects of UGC can aid in understanding user purchase intention and commodity recommendation. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of UGC on purchase decisions and proposes new recommendation models based on sentiment analysis, which are verified in Douban, one of the most popular UGC websites in China.

After verifying the relationship between various factors and product sales, this study proposes two models, collaborative filtering recommendation model based on sentiment (SCF) and hidden factors topics recommendation model based on sentiment (SHFT), by combining traditional collaborative filtering model (CF) and hidden factors topics model (HFT) with sentiment analysis.

The results indicate that sentiment significantly influences purchase intention. Furthermore, the proposed sentiment-based recommendation models outperform traditional CF and HFT in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE). Moreover, the two models yield different outcomes for various product categories, providing actionable insights for organizers to implement more precise recommendation strategies.

The findings of this study advocate the incorporation of UGC sentimental factors into websites to heighten recommendation accuracy. Additionally, different recommendation strategies can be employed for different products types.

This study introduces a novel perspective to the recommendation algorithm field. It not only validates the impact of UGC sentiment on purchase intention but also evaluates the proposed models with real-world data. The study provides valuable insights for managerial decision-making aimed at enhancing recommendation systems.

To investigate whether additional information of the permanent news flow, especially reporting intensity, can help to increase transparency in housing markets, this study aims to examine the relationship between news coverage or news sentiment and residential real estate prices in Germany at a regional level.

Using methods in the field of natural language processing, in particular word embeddings and dictionary-based sentiment analyses, the authors derive five different sentiment measures from almost 320,000 news articles of two professional German real estate news providers. These sentiment indicators are used as covariates in a first difference fixed effects regression to investigate the relationship between news coverage or news sentiment and residential real estate prices.

The empirical results suggest that the ascertained news-based indicators have a significant positive relationship with residential real estate prices. It appears that the combination of news coverage and news sentiment proves to be a reliable indicator. Furthermore, the extracted sentiment measures lead residential real estate prices up to two quarters. Finally, the explanatory power increases when regressing on prices for condominiums compared with houses, implying that the indicators may rather reflect investor sentiment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to extract both the news coverage and news sentiment from real estate-related news for regional German housing markets. The approach presented in this study to quantify additional qualitative data from texts is replicable and can be applied to many further research areas on real estate topics.