COMMIT at SemEval-2017 Task 5: Ontology-based Method for Sentiment Analysis of Financial Headlines

This paper describes our submission to Task 5 of SemEval 2017, Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis on Financial Microblogs and News, where we limit ourselves to performing sentiment analysis on news headlines only (track 2). The approach presented in this paper uses a Support Vector Machine to do the required regression, and besides unigrams and a sentiment tool, we use various ontology-based features. To this end we created a domain ontology that models various concepts from the financial domain. This allows us to model the sentiment of actions depending on which entity they are affecting (e.g., decreasing debt is positive, but decreasing profit is negative). The presented approach yielded a cosine distance of 0.6810 on the official test data, resulting in the 12th position.