Automated Financial News Understanding System

I've just had the great pleasure of finishing up the http://www.newsmental.com news analysis, aggregator and community opinion formation web 2.0 system. That's right the system performs these 3 main things:

• News from numerous sources is extracted more than 6 times a day and clustered based on simillarity of the article's text, this provides a nice overview of all the news, and in adition trending news are highlited, right at the top of the page. This sounds a little bit like news.google.com but there's much more to it, read on to find out... :-)
• News is automatically analysed using some pretty heavy text-mining AI techniques in order to extract entities, places, people, facts, relationships and other semanitc / meaningful elements from the articles. These extracts are presented in each news-item's panel so that the user can avoid having to read the entire article - a simple lookup at the entities and relationships will provide all the quick info needed under time pressure!!
• Most interestingly the newsmental system allows any user (logged-in or not) to rate the sentiment and impact of the news-article as you perceive it personally. This is something I would call - collaborative news analysis ala web 2.0 style! Eventually you won't be reading the news alone but every visitor to the site reads the same news-items, why then, not share the individual news understanding with the community, to help understand the news even better, than you would on your own maybe...

Let me mention that newsmental is a research project in community opinion aggregation research for my PhD, and is hence an academic study with noble research aims at better understanding collaborative news analysis. So in summary newsmental is a system that can potentially save you a lot of time keeping up with all the wide business, economics and finance news. This tool could be quite useful to traders and similar professionals where being aware of news and their overal implications plays a major role!

Thanks for reading all the way, to finish off the article I provide a few useful links:
[1] Quick (2 minute) Guide - http://www.newsmental.com/tutorialintro.aspx
[2] FAQ and some background info: http://www.newsmental.com/faq.aspx (here you can leave your email behind if you are interested into the outcomes of our study)
[3] Full Tutorial - http://www.newsmental.com/tutorial.aspx

My Personal Page

I just set-up my personal page (my blog is still here) on the lboro.ac.uk server, feel free to pay it a visit - http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~comds2...

News Tweeting

I never really followed the Twitter.com phenomenon. I did join up thought and have had an account for some time now. I remember when twitter was still in its obscurity, not many people knew about it and I thought what a funny concept to share one line thoughts with random web surfers. 

Recently a study by Pear Analytics classified twitter talk and discovered, based on their statisticall classification that around 40% of all twitter posts is pointless blabber, they also found that the count of poststwhich could possibly be classed as news related was minimal (below 10%). 

Chris Matyszcyk submitted an interesting opinion. He suggests that the blabber itself is off value to many people and is actually quite usefull way of accumulating new knowledge. See for yourself, on his blog.

Interesting I thought... any opinions welcome, just drop me an email or comment!!