• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.1-27
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• 2017

It is known that the economic sentiment index and macroeconomic indicators are closely related because economic agent's judgment and forecast of the business conditions affect economic fluctuations. For this reason, consumer sentiment or confidence provides steady fodder for business and is treated as an important piece of economic information. In Korea, private consumption accounts and consumer sentiment index highly relevant for both, which is a very important economic indicator for evaluating and forecasting the domestic economic situation. However, despite offering relevant insights into private consumption and GDP, the traditional approach to measuring the consumer confidence based on the survey has several limits. One possible weakness is that it takes considerable time to research, collect, and aggregate the data. If certain urgent issues arise, timely information will not be announced until the end of each month. In addition, the survey only contains information derived from questionnaire items, which means it can be difficult to catch up to the direct effects of newly arising issues. The survey also faces potential declines in response rates and erroneous responses. Therefore, it is necessary to find a way to complement it. For this purpose, we construct and assess an index designed to measure consumer economic sentiment index using sentiment analysis. Unlike the survey-based measures, our index relies on textual analysis to extract sentiment from economic and financial news articles. In particular, text data such as news articles and SNS are timely and cover a wide range of issues; because such sources can quickly capture the economic impact of specific economic issues, they have great potential as economic indicators. There exist two main approaches to the automatic extraction of sentiment from a text, we apply the lexicon-based approach, using sentiment lexicon dictionaries of words annotated with the semantic orientations. In creating the sentiment lexicon dictionaries, we enter the semantic orientation of individual words manually, though we do not attempt a full linguistic analysis (one that involves analysis of word senses or argument structure); this is the limitation of our research and further work in that direction remains possible. In this study, we generate a time series index of economic sentiment in the news. The construction of the index consists of three broad steps: (1) Collecting a large corpus of economic news articles on the web, (2) Applying lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis of each article to score the article in terms of sentiment orientation (positive, negative and neutral), and (3) Constructing an economic sentiment index of consumers by aggregating monthly time series for each sentiment word. In line with existing scholarly assessments of the relationship between the consumer confidence index and macroeconomic indicators, any new index should be assessed for its usefulness. We examine the new index's usefulness by comparing other economic indicators to the CSI. To check the usefulness of the newly index based on sentiment analysis, trend and cross - correlation analysis are carried out to analyze the relations and lagged structure. Finally, we analyze the forecasting power using the one step ahead of out of sample prediction. As a result, the news sentiment index correlates strongly with related contemporaneous key indicators in almost all experiments. We also find that news sentiment shocks predict future economic activity in most cases. In almost all experiments, the news sentiment index strongly correlates with related contemporaneous key indicators. Furthermore, in most cases, news sentiment shocks predict future economic activity; in head-to-head comparisons, the news sentiment measures outperform survey-based sentiment index as CSI. Policy makers want to understand consumer or public opinions about existing or proposed policies. Such opinions enable relevant government decision-makers to respond quickly to monitor various web media, SNS, or news articles. Textual data, such as news articles and social networks (Twitter, Facebook and blogs) are generated at high-speeds and cover a wide range of issues; because such sources can quickly capture the economic impact of specific economic issues, they have great potential as economic indicators. Although research using unstructured data in economic analysis is in its early stages, but the utilization of data is expected to greatly increase once its usefulness is confirmed.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.1-19
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• 2018

Since stock movements forecasting is an important issue both academically and practically, studies related to stock price prediction have been actively conducted. The stock price forecasting research is classified into structured data and unstructured data, and it is divided into technical analysis, fundamental analysis and media effect analysis in detail. In the big data era, research on stock price prediction combining big data is actively underway. Based on a large number of data, stock prediction research mainly focuses on machine learning techniques. Especially, research methods that combine the effects of media are attracting attention recently, among which researches that analyze online news and utilize online news to forecast stock prices are becoming main. Previous studies predicting stock prices through online news are mostly sentiment analysis of news, making different corpus for each company, and making a dictionary that predicts stock prices by recording responses according to the past stock price. Therefore, existing studies have examined the impact of online news on individual companies. For example, stock movements of Samsung Electronics are predicted with only online news of Samsung Electronics. In addition, a method of considering influences among highly relevant companies has also been studied recently. For example, stock movements of Samsung Electronics are predicted with news of Samsung Electronics and a highly related company like LG Electronics.These previous studies examine the effects of news of industrial sector with homogeneity on the individual company. In the previous studies, homogeneous industries are classified according to the Global Industrial Classification Standard. In other words, the existing studies were analyzed under the assumption that industries divided into Global Industrial Classification Standard have homogeneity. However, existing studies have limitations in that they do not take into account influential companies with high relevance or reflect the existence of heterogeneity within the same Global Industrial Classification Standard sectors. As a result of our examining the various sectors, it can be seen that there are sectors that show the industrial sectors are not a homogeneous group. To overcome these limitations of existing studies that do not reflect heterogeneity, our study suggests a methodology that reflects the heterogeneous effects of the industrial sector that affect the stock price by applying k-means clustering. Multiple Kernel Learning is mainly used to integrate data with various characteristics. Multiple Kernel Learning has several kernels, each of which receives and predicts different data. To incorporate effects of target firm and its relevant firms simultaneously, we used Multiple Kernel Learning. Each kernel was assigned to predict stock prices with variables of financial news of the industrial group divided by the target firm, K-means cluster analysis. In order to prove that the suggested methodology is appropriate, experiments were conducted through three years of online news and stock prices. The results of this study are as follows. (1) We confirmed that the information of the industrial sectors related to target company also contains meaningful information to predict stock movements of target company and confirmed that machine learning algorithm has better predictive power when considering the news of the relevant companies and target company's news together. (2) It is important to predict stock movements with varying number of clusters according to the level of homogeneity in the industrial sector. In other words, when stock prices are homogeneous in industrial sectors, it is important to use relational effect at the level of industry group without analyzing clusters or to use it in small number of clusters. When the stock price is heterogeneous in industry group, it is important to cluster them into groups. This study has a contribution that we testified firms classified as Global Industrial Classification Standard have heterogeneity and suggested it is necessary to define the relevance through machine learning and statistical analysis methodology rather than simply defining it in the Global Industrial Classification Standard. It has also contribution that we proved the efficiency of the prediction model reflecting heterogeneity.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.251-273
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• 2022

Recently, research on applying text analysis to deep learning has steadily continued. In particular, researches have been actively conducted to understand the meaning of words and perform tasks such as summarization and sentiment classification through a pre-trained language model that learns large datasets. However, existing pre-trained language models show limitations in that they do not understand specific domains well. Therefore, in recent years, the flow of research has shifted toward creating a language model specialized for a particular domain. Domain-specific pre-trained language models allow the model to understand the knowledge of a particular domain better and reveal performance improvements on various tasks in the field. However, domain-specific further pre-training is expensive to acquire corpus data of the target domain. Furthermore, many cases have reported that performance improvement after further pre-training is insignificant in some domains. As such, it is difficult to decide to develop a domain-specific pre-trained language model, while it is not clear whether the performance will be improved dramatically. In this paper, we present a way to proactively check the expected performance improvement by further pre-training in a domain before actually performing further pre-training. Specifically, after selecting three domains, we measured the increase in classification accuracy through further pre-training in each domain. We also developed and presented new indicators to estimate the specificity of the domain based on the normalized frequency of the keywords used in each domain. Finally, we conducted classification using a pre-trained language model and a domain-specific pre-trained language model of three domains. As a result, we confirmed that the higher the domain specificity index, the higher the performance improvement through further pre-training.