FBK ranks 1st in an international competition on Fintech, Big Data and sentiment analysis.
March 6, 2017
A joint team between FBK and Fortia Financial Solutions recently took part at the SemEval 2017 challenge on predicting sentiment from financial news headlines.
Real time information is key for decision making in highly technical domains such as finance. It is no coincidence that there is an explosive growth of financial technology industry (Fintech), and a growing interest in the market for Artificial Intelligence-based technologies. Opinion-rich texts such as micro-blogging and news can have an important impact in the financial sector (raise or fall in stock value) or in the overall economy. In such a context, having granular access to the opinions of part of the population is of key interest to any actor in the field. In order to take advantage of this raw data, it is thus needed to develop machine learning methods allowing to convert unstructured text into information that can be managed and exploited.
In this scenario, a joint team between FBK and Fortia (1) group recently took part at the SemEval 2017 challenge on predicting sentiment from financial news headlines. SemEval is an ongoing series of evaluations campaigns of semantic analysis systems. Evaluations are intended to explore the nature of meaning in language, and gather research and industry groups from all around the world. More than 45 competitors and systems took part in the challenge on sentiment from financial news, and the FBK-Fortia team ranked 1st. Their winning approach leverages – in an innovative way – affective lexica and word embeddings in combination with convolutional neural networks to infer the sentiment of financial news.
Group Members: Lorenzo Gatti and Marco Guerini (from FBK); Sira Ferradans, Youness Mansar and Jacopo Staiano (from the R&D team of Fortia Financial Solutions).
(1) Fortia Financial Solutions is a RegTech company created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis by asset management professionals. They propose innovative solutions addressing complex issues in the context of financial regulation. Since its creation, Fortia Financial Solutions has chosen innovation by strongly investing in R&D activities, comprising Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Big Data solutions.
