A0472
Title: Introductionary tutorial to text mining in econometrics
Authors: Peter Winker - University of Giessen (Germany) [presenting]
Abstract: There is a growing interest in and use of textual information in different fields of economics comprising financial markets (statements by analysts, communication of central banks) over innovation activities (patent abstracts, firm websites), and the development of economic science (journal articles). Using such textual information for quantitative analysis involves several steps including, e.g., 1) the selection of appropriate sources (corpora) and establishing access, 2) the preparation of the text data for further analysis, 3) the identification of themes within documents, 4) the quantification of the relevance of themes in different documents, 5) the aggregation of relevant information, e.g., across sectors or over time, 6) the application of the generated indicators. The tutorial will provide some first insights and recommendations concerning these steps of the analysis and address open issues regarding, e.g., computational complexity and statistical robustness of the methods. All steps will be illustrated with empirical examples.
