Econometrics meets sentiment : an overview of methodology and applications

The advent of massive amounts of textual, audio, and visual data has spurred the development of econometric methodology to transform qualitative sentiment data into quantitative sentiment variables, and to use those variables in an econometric analysis of the relationships between sentiment and other variables. We survey this emerging research field and refer to it as sentometrics, which is a portmanteau of sentiment and econometrics. We provide a synthesis of the relevant methodological approaches, illustrate with empirical results, and discuss useful software

Mutual-Excitation of Cryptocurrency Market Returns and Social Media Topics

Cryptocurrencies have recently experienced a new wave of price volatility and interest; activity within social media communities relating to cryptocurrencies has increased significantly. There is currently limited documented knowledge of factors which could indicate future price movements. This paper aims to decipher relationships between cryptocurrency price changes and topic discussion on social media to provide, among other things, an understanding of which topics are indicative of future price movements. To achieve this a well-known dynamic topic modelling approach is applied to social media communication to retrieve information about the temporal occurrence of various topics. A Hawkes model is then applied to find interactions between topics and cryptocurrency prices. The results show particular topics tend to precede certain types of price movements, for example the discussion of 'risk and investment vs trading' being indicative of price falls, the discussion of 'substantial price movements' being indicative of volatility, and the discussion of 'fundamental cryptocurrency value' by technical communities being indicative of price rises. The knowledge of topic relationships gained here could be built into a real-time system, providing trading or alerting signals.Comment: 3rd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Applications (ICKEA 2018) - Moscow, Russia (June 25-27 2018

Crowdsourced real-world sensing: sentiment analysis and the real-time web

The advent of the real-time web is proving both challeng- ing and at the same time disruptive for a number of areas of research, notably information retrieval and web data mining. As an area of research reaching maturity, sentiment analysis oers a promising direction for modelling the text content available in real-time streams. This paper reviews the real-time web as a new area of focus for sentiment analysis and discusses the motivations and challenges behind such a direction

Basic tasks of sentiment analysis

Subjectivity detection is the task of identifying objective and subjective sentences. Objective sentences are those which do not exhibit any sentiment. So, it is desired for a sentiment analysis engine to find and separate the objective sentences for further analysis, e.g., polarity detection. In subjective sentences, opinions can often be expressed on one or multiple topics. Aspect extraction is a subtask of sentiment analysis that consists in identifying opinion targets in opinionated text, i.e., in detecting the specific aspects of a product or service the opinion holder is either praising or complaining about

Data Innovation for International Development: An overview of natural language processing for qualitative data analysis

Availability, collection and access to quantitative data, as well as its limitations, often make qualitative data the resource upon which development programs heavily rely. Both traditional interview data and social media analysis can provide rich contextual information and are essential for research, appraisal, monitoring and evaluation. These data may be difficult to process and analyze both systematically and at scale. This, in turn, limits the ability of timely data driven decision-making which is essential in fast evolving complex social systems. In this paper, we discuss the potential of using natural language processing to systematize analysis of qualitative data, and to inform quick decision-making in the development context. We illustrate this with interview data generated in a format of micro-narratives for the UNDP Fragments of Impact project