【Topic】Pseudo Labeling for the Construction of Domain-specific Sentiment Lexicons and Its Financial Applications

【Speaker】Raymond Y. K. LAU，Associate Professor in the Department of Information Systems at City University of Hong Kong

【Time】April 11th, Thursday, 10:30-11:30

【Venue】Room 453，Weilun Building, Tsinghua SEM 

【Language 】English

【Organizer】Department of Management Science and Engineering

【Abstract】Sentiment lexicons have been widely used for sentiment analysis. However, manually constructing domain-specific sentiment lexicons is extremely time consuming and it may not even be feasible for domains where linguistic expertise is not available. Research on the automatic construction of domain-specific sentiment lexicons has become a hot topic in recent years. In this presentation, the research work about our semi-supervised learning method which exploits the “distributional characteristic” of sentiments in labeled or unlabeled corpora for the construction of domain-specific sentiment lexicons will be discussed. More specifically, the proposed two-pass “pseudo labeling” algorithm combines shallow linguistic parsing and corpus-base statistical learning to make sentiment lexicon learning scalable with respect to the sheer volume of opinionated documents archived on the Internet these days. As subjectively assessed by human experts, the automatically constructed domain-specific sentiment lexicons are considered to have high quality. Based on an objective polarity prediction task at the document level, it is shown that our domain-specific sentiment lexicons outperform other well-known baseline methods. Finally, the applications of our domain-specific sentiment lexicons to financial prediction tasks are highlighted and the business implications of our research work are discussed.

【Short Bibliography of the Speaker】Raymond Y. K. LAU is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Systems at City University of Hong Kong. Dr. Lau obtained his PhD in Information Technology from Queensland University of Technology, Australia in 2003. Before joining the academic field, he has worked in the ICT industry with the roles of system analyst and project manager for fifteen years. He is the author of over 100 refereed international journals and conference papers. His research work has been published in renowned journals such as MIS Quarterly, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Internet Computing, Journal of MIS, Decision Support Systems, etc. His research interests include Social Media Analytics, Big Data Analytics, and Information Retrieval. He is the associate editors of the International Journal of Systems and Service-Oriented Engineering, and ACM Transactions on MIS. Dr. Lau is a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM, respectively. He is also a life member of the Hong Kong Computer Society.