Sentiment classification of financial news using statistical features

Sentiment classification of financial news deals with the identification of positive and negative news so that they can be applied in decision support systems for stock trend predictions. This paper explores several types of feature spaces as different data spaces for sentiment classification of the news article. Experiments are conducted using N-gram models unigram, bigram and the combination of unigram and bigram as feature extraction with traditional feature weighting methods (binary, term frequency (TF), and term frequency-document frequency (TF-IDF)), while document frequency (DF) was used in order to generate feature spaces with different dimensions to evaluate N-gram models and traditional feature weighting methods. We performed some experiments to measure the classification accuracy of support vector machine (SVM) with two kernel methods of Linear and Gaussian radial basis function (RBF). We concluded that feature selection and feature weighting methods can have a substantial role in sentiment classification. Furthermore, the results showed that the proposed work which combined unigram and bigram along with TF-IDF feature weighting method and optimized RBF kernel SVM produced high classification accuracy in financial news classification

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

Topic-dependent sentiment analysis of financial blogs

While most work in sentiment analysis in the financial domain has focused on the use of content from traditional finance news, in this work we concentrate on more subjective sources of information, blogs. We aim to automatically determine the sentiment of financial bloggers towards companies and their stocks. To do this we develop a corpus of financial blogs, annotated with polarity of sentiment with respect to a number of companies. We conduct an analysis of the annotated corpus, from which we show there is a significant level of topic shift within this collection, and also illustrate the difficulty that human annotators have when annotating certain sentiment categories. To deal with the problem of topic shift within blog articles, we propose text extraction techniques to create topic-specific sub-documents, which we use to train a sentiment classifier. We show that such approaches provide a substantial improvement over full documentclassification and that word-based approaches perform better than sentence-based or paragraph-based approaches