A0494
Title: Sentiment analysis of economic text: A lexicon-based approach
Authors: Luca Barbaglia - European Commission Joint Research Centre (Italy) [presenting]
Sergio Consoli - Joint Research Centre (JRC) (Italy)
Sebastiano Manzan - City University of New York (United States)
Luca Tiozzo Pezzoli - JRC European Commission (Italy)
Elisa Tosetti - University of Padua (Italy)
Abstract: The goal is to propose a dictionary specifically designed for textual applications in economics. We construct the dictionary with two important characteristics: 1) to have wide coverage of terms typically used in documents discussing economic and financial concepts, and 2) to provide a human-annotated sentiment score in the range [-1,1]. The sentiment score is a useful feature when the interest is to weigh words by their sentiment content as opposed to categorizing terms in positive and negative. We use the dictionary to construct a measure of economic pessimism and show that it captures the business cycle and correlates with measures of economic and financial uncertainty.