Chapter 5. Parsing Textual Data with Natural Language Processing
It's no accident that Peter Brown, Co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, one of the most successful quantitative hedge funds of all time, had previously worked at IBM, where he applied machine learning to natural language problems.
As we've explored in earlier chapters, in today's world, information drives finance, and the most important source of information is written and spoken language. Ask any finance professional what they are actually spending time on, and you will find that a significant part of their time is spent on reading. This can cover everything from reading headlines on tickers, to reading a Form 10K, the financial press, or various analyst reports; the list goes on and on. Automatically processing this information can increase the speed of trades occurring and widen the breadth of information considered for trades while at the same time reducing overall costs.
Natural language processing (NLP) is making inroads...