Textual Analysis in Economics and Finance

从业者和研究人员面临着必须从当今大量可用的非结构化数据中提取信息的挑战。这些数据通常采用以自然语言编写的文本形式，例如公司文件、收益电话会议记录、新闻文章、twitter feed等。由于它的大小，手工处理这些数据是不可行的。相反，需要基于计算机的文本分析方法。文本分析，即从文本中自动提取信息，与分析结构化数据（如表列时间序列数据）相比，需要根本不同的方法。金融学者已经开始采用语言学和机器学习的文本分析方法进行研究。例如，文本分析正被应用于提取金融文本的语气或复杂性，并分析它们对确认业绩和投资者行为的影响。尽管这些最初的成功尝试，文本分析还不是金融经济学研究的标准工具集的一部分。这是由于这个相对较新的学科的方法论问题，以及由于文本分析在金融经济学的各个领域尚未被证明有用的事实。scientificnetwork旨在解决这些挑战。为此目的，确定了现有研究缺乏的三个领域：测试现有方法在金融文本中选择和分类信息的能力。文本分析在资本市场和企业财务中的应用。文本分析在国际语境中的应用，即应用于用外语写的文本。

Practitioners and researchers face the challenge of having to extract information from the vast amount of unstructureddata available today. This data typically takes the form of text written in natural language, such ascorporate filings, transcripts of earnings calls, news articles, twitter feeds, etc.. Due to its size, it is infeasibleto manually process this data. Instead, computer-based methods of textual analysis are required. Textualanalysis, i.e. automated extraction of information from text, requires fundamentally different approaches comparedto analyzing structured data, such as tabulated time-series data. Academics in finance have startedto adopt methods of textual analysis from linguistics and machine learning for their research. For instance,textual analysis is being applied to extract the tone or complexity of financial texts and analyze their effect onfirm performance and investor behavior.Despite these first successful attempts, textual analysis is not yet part of the standard toolset in financialeconomics research. This is due to methodological issues of this relatively new discipline, and due to the factthat textual analysis has yet to be proven useful in the various fields of financial economics. The scientificnetwork aims to address these challenges. To this end, three areas of a lack of existing research have beenidentified:1. Testing the ability of existing methods to select and classify information in financial texts.2. Application of textual analysis in the context of capital markets and corporate finance applications.3. Application of textual analysis in the international context, i.e. application to text written in foreign languages.