Publications

intelligententerprise.com/blog, Seth Grimes, September 18, 2008

Richard Brown of Thomson Reuters delivered an illuminating talk, "News, Blogs, and Full-Tick Logs: Innovative Approaches to Quantitative and Event-Driven Trading," Tuesday at Gartner's Event Processing Summit. The summit and the Event Processing Technical Society symposium now underway feature many such use cases, descriptions of low-latency transformation and analysis of high-volume data and event streams as applied to diverse business problems. Brown's case study, which looked at exploiting information from unstructured sources to support financial-market trading, was of particular interest (to me) due to its combination of events, text sources, and sentiment analysis.

Brown's talk profiled the Reuters NewsScope Sentiment Engine, which "processes a stream of Reuters English language news items, producing sentiment data for a list of customer determined target companies." You can read more on line, including about theapplication of technology from Infonic to assess author sentiment. The application assigns sentiment scores to selected words and phrases but goes beyond simple numbers, per Brown's presentation, to assess topical relevance - Is a given item substantively about the subject company - and novelty - How unique (and fresh) is the news? In the financial sector, it is especially important to distinguish updates from new news.

Read more.