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Sentiment analysis of news articles for financial signal prediction. Anand Atreya Nicholas Cohen Jinjiang James Zhai. Motivation. Financial markets can be swayed by sentiment Bearish sentiment can make a down market worse and lessen the impact of positive news
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Sentiment analysis of news articles for financial signal prediction Anand Atreya Nicholas Cohen Jinjiang James Zhai
Motivation • Financial markets can be swayed by sentiment • Bearish sentiment can make a down market worse and lessen the impact of positive news • Vice versa for bullish sentiment • Firms which take advantage of sentiment information quickly can gain an edge • Computers analyzing sentiment can work far faster (and for less money) than human analysts • Our hypothesis: sentiment can be discovered in news articles about finance
Methods • Data sets: • New York Times articles about finance (from the business section, containing the word “stock”, and with the metatag “financial desk”) from the LDC corpus • Articles from 2006 were used • S&P 500 data used as representative of market • Stanford MaxEnt classifier was used
Methods (continued) • Two approaches were tried • Manual sentiment training: manually classified articles into positive, neutral, or negative sentiment, used these sets as training and test • Automatic: used the market return for the day preceding the news article with thresholds for positive, neutral, negative
Results: classification • F1 for manual classification (positive, neutral, negative): • 0.581, 0.614, 0.568 (141 test cases) • F1 results for automatic classification with and without metadata filtering: • Decent results for manual classification; mixed results for automatic classification • Using metadata filtering appears to help in most cases (except negative sentiment)
Results: correlation with market Not clear that article sentiment is correlated with market movements
Future work • Classify different portions of an article • Some articles discuss several stocks or events with different sentiment • Select news articles only discussing companies in the S&P 500 index • Classify articles that come in throughout the day (i.e. over a wire) and correlate with market movements intra-day • Use a time window of more than one day for market returns: sentiment may correlate with longer term movements • Could use a moving average for this