Cause information extraction from financial articles concerning business performance

Abstract

We propose a method of extracting cause information from Japanese financial articles concerning business performance. Our method acquires cause information, e.g. "(zidousya no uriage ga koutyou: Sales of cars were good)". Cause information is useful for investors in selecting companies to invest. Our method extracts cause information as a form of causal expression by using statistical information and initial clue expressions automatically. Our method can extract causal expressions without predetermined patterns or complex rules given by hand, and is expected to be applied to other tasks for acquiring phrases that have a particular meaning not limited to cause information. We compared our method with our previous one originally proposed for extracting phrases concerning traffic accident causes and experimental results showed that our new method outperforms our previous one. Copyright © 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.