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Gold-standard for Topic-specific Sentiment Analysis of Economic Texts

Public opinion, as measured by media sentiment, can be an important indicator in the financial and economic context. These are domains where traditional sentiment estimation techniques often struggle, and existing annotated sentiment text collections are of less use. Though considerable progress has been made in analyzing sentiments at sentence-level, performing topic-dependent sentiment analysis is still a relatively uncharted territory. The computation of topic-specific sentiments has commonly relied on naive aggregation methods without much consideration to the relevance of the sentences to the given topic. Clearly, the use of such methods leads to a substantial increase in noise-to-signal ratio. To foster development of methods for measuring topic-specific sentiments in documents, we have collected and annotated a corpus of financial news that have been sampled from Thomson Reuters newswire. In this paper, we describe the annotation process and evaluate the quality of the dataset using a number of inter-annotator agreement metrics. The annotations of 297 documents and over 9000 sentences can be used for research purposes when developing methods for detecting topic-wise sentiment in financial text.