Sharif Digital Repository

This thesis examines the impact of electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) on product demand forecasting, specifically in the context of video game consoles. This study examines the importance of emotion-based topics and their impact on demand forecasting at two stages of the product life cycle: pre-launch and post-launch. Using sentiment analysis and topic modeling, this study uncovers product sales drivers and captures evolving consumer sentiment throughout the product lifecycle. By integrating insights from diffusion theory and consumer information search theory, this research contributes to the field of demand forecasting using social media data. This research shows that by using the topics... 

Using the data of the Tehran Stock Exchange, we analyze the characteristics and explanatory factors of major intra-group and out-of-group transactions and test the tunneling hypothesis in intra-group transactions. We find that out-of-group transactions can be largely explained by changes in control or management, firm size, and the type of the firm. However, intra-group transaction properties mostly depend on the difference between the parent company's cash flow rights in the buyer and seller companies. Also, in the final analysis, we conclude that many intra-group transactions are made to change the structure of the business groups, especially when investment companies buy shares of listed... 

Since the classical continuum theory fails to deal with the problems associated with defects, stress concentrators, and relevant deformation phenomena in solids, alternative approaches that can detect the atomistic nature of materials' fracture are required. The deficiency of the capture the size effect which yields delusively high values for some components of the stress field right on the edge of the stress concentrators, and its weakness in describing the complex interaction between small inhomogeneities, cracks and the like when they are only a few nanometers apart, are among some of the disadvantages of the classical approach. In recent years, however, atomistic methods are emerging to... 

Aluminum Bronzes have many applications in marine environments. These alloys suffer from both hot cracking and cold cracking. In order to overcome the hot cracking and cold cracking, Semisolid Stir Joining method and a proper thermal cycle was used respectively. Effects of temperature, stirring rate, and tool type were investigated in Semisolid Stir joining method. In this method, butt joint design was used in order to place specimens, and the specimens were heated up to specific temperatures (920, 925, 930°C). A stirrer (Cylindrical and Grooved tool) with three rotational speeds (800, 1200, 1600 RPM) was introduced into the stir weld seam. Welded specimens were cooled to the 900°C... 

The low female labor force participation rate in the Iranian labor market relative to the global average and even to countries that do not differ significantly from the socio-economic characteristics of our country is one of the important questions of the Iranian labor market. In this study, we seek to answer the question of whether the economic participation rate of married women will increase if the gender gaps in wages, job findings and job losses among women and men are eliminated in the Iranian labor market. To answer this question using household expenditure and income data and labor force data, we show that between the two categories of occupations, in terms of the share of women's... 

Shot peening is a cold-working process commonly used in industry to improve the fatigue performance, stress corrosion resistance and surface nano-crystallization of metallic parts. This process extends fatigue life via two mechanisms: Preventing the crack growth due to compressive residual stresses and, preventing the crack initiation because of increased material hardness. These mechanisms are the results of the bombardment of the component's surface with small spherical particles. In this research, an analytical model is developed for estimating the residual stress distribution induced by shot peening process. The modifications of the developed analytical model are related to... 

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) provide high performance, low power consumption, and hence are widely used in the I/O cache of enterprise storage systems and high performance servers. Although employing high performance SSDs in the I/O cache of storage systems significantly improves system performance, it comes with significant reliability threats for write operations upon power failures. In order to provide high level of reliability, storage architectures employ SSDs in I/O cache with RAID-1 configuration, however, such configuration only partially mitigates the reliability issues of the SSDs. In this thesis, we analyze the reliability of SSD-based I/O caches against power outage and high... 

Language model is one of the most important parsts of an automated speech recognition system whiche incorporates the knowledge of Natural Language to the system to improve its accuracy. Conventionally used language model in recognition systems is ngram which usually is extracted from a large corpus using related frequency method. ngram model approximates the probability of a word sequence by multiplying its ngram probabilities and thus does not take into account the long distance dependencies. So, syntactic language models could be of interest. In this research after probing different syntactic language models, a mehtod for re-estimating ngram model, introduced by Stolcke in 1994, was...