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AP financial stories written and published by an automated system
- mratzloff 11y agoI see someone watched Hasan Minhaj's report on this topic on The Daily Show last night. For the curious: http://www.cc.com/video-clips/fh76l0/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-robot-journalists http://www.cc.com/video-clips/fh76l0/the-daily-show-with-tre...
- arethuza 11y agoThe next step would them presumably be to automate the consumption of these articles. Then once you've done that why not cut out the need for natural language and simply agree on some formal language that encodes the contents of the article in some way that makes it easy to process. Given that financial articles are usually of a few standard formats I wonder how far you could go with some kind of "Financial Statement Modelling Language"?
- harperlee 11y agoLike XBRL? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL
- arethuza 11y agoThat looks like an XML format for standard financial reports (balance sheet, P&L etc.) - what I was thinking about is something more general and more "event-based": acquisitions, divestments, new products etc.
- harperlee 11y agoWell significant events that may impact on the price of the stock should be communicated officialy, so for those kinds of things I think it should be feasible. Buy I'm no expert on it, though!
- njharman 11y agoAnd I'm sure there are financial institutions with Natural Language systems trying to "read" these stories. Humans just get in the way.
- vonnik 11y agoI used to work for a financial news service. The Fed's interest rate announcements were automated; they hit the wire service, which had an automated template to push out headlines on the news (human oversight but not much intervention); and the high-speed traders had NLP to interpret the headlines, place a bet and move the market, generating more news for automated headlines. The circle was complete.
- IgorPartola 11y agoI came here to say exactly this. I can only imagine how the news will look after being through the ringer a few times. Also, do these systems have any cycle detection so that the same story is not retold over and over?
- harmegido 11y agoWell it'd all be news. Here's the steps: 1) Fed makes announcement (news generated) 2) Machine traders read news and make appropriate trades 3) Markets move (if big enough, news generated) 4) Machine traders see markets move, possibly make appropriate trades 5) Markets move again (if big enough, news generated Each movement in the markets, if it were big enough to be news worthy, would generate a news event. That is ok, because news readers would want to know about large market movements (well other news readers would - I really wouldn't). It's up to the traders to decide if they want to keep buying/selling.
- mring33621 11y agoA nice positive feedback cycle!
- jagermo 11y agoCombine that with high frequency trading analysis and you have a nice target for someone who wants to shake up the world of finance a litte. I'm not against something like that, but if you don't have a human oversight somewhere you are bound to run into trouble. Just look what happens when a twitter account gets compromised.
- harmegido 11y agoThere was a huge market movement on a hacked AP tweet claiming Obama was injured/under attack a while ago. If you're doctor evil, this is your new best way to make a lot of money. The appropriate regulatory body would probably notice a bunch of activity in way out of the money options prior to something like that though.
- vittore 11y agoHow I would build thing like that myself? Machine learning?
- dontscale 11y agopresumably the way you'd write a table-based report by interpreting some raw data source, but you'd use natural language for the presentation. i could see a.i. coming into play with subjective stories, but earnings reports can be written very objectively.