NLP question tonight

[Joe Snikeris <joe@snikeris.com>]

Hi all,

Someone had a question about inferring positive or negative sentiment
from a given text. His example was processing SEC filings to determine
if their content reflected negatively on a particular company.

There is a system called the General Inquirer[1] that can provide word
scores indicating how positive or negative a given word is. For
example, words like 'dire', 'shortage', and 'layoff' would have scores
that indicate a negative connotation. For an example of how this can
be used to make trading decisions see the Google Tech Talk by David
Leinweber[2]. His slides[3] mention the General Inquirer on page 10.

Regards,
Joe Snikeris

[1] http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~inquirer/
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJqtqNl5G4E
[3] http://tinyurl.com/74nh8zn (PDF)