Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)

Effects of Investor Sentiment Using Social Media on Corporate Financial Distress

The mainstream quantitative models in the finance literature have been ineffective in detecting possible bankruptcies during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. Coinciding with the same period, various researchers suggested that sentiments in social media can predict future events. The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between investor sentiment within the social media and the financial distress of firms Grounded on the social amplification of risk framework that shows the media as an amplified channel for risk events, the central hypothesis of the study was that investor sentiments in the social media could predict t he level of financial distress of firms. Third quarter 2014 financial data and 66,038 public postings in the social media website Twitter were collected for 5,787 publicly held firms in the United States for this study. The Spearman rank correlation was applied using Altman Z-Score for measuring financial distress levels in corporate firms and Stanford natural language processing algorithm for detecting sentiment levels in the social media. The findings from the study suggested a non-significant relationship between investor sentiments in the social media and corporate financial distress, and, hence, did not support the research hypothesis. However, the model developed in this study for analyzing investor sentiments and corporate distress in firms is both original and extensible for future research and is also accessible as a low-cost solution for financial market sentiment analysis

A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation

`Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats.Comment: 49 page

Extracting Temporal Expressions from Unstructured Open Resources

AETAS is an end-to-end system with SOA approach that retrieves plain text data from web and blog news and represents and stores them in RDF, with a special focus on their temporal dimension. The system allows users to acquire, browse and query Linked Data obtained from unstructured sources