Sentiment Analysis of Economic Text: A Lexicon-based Approach

Abstract

We propose an Economic Lexicon (EL) specifically designed for textual applications in economics. We construct the dictionary with two important characteristics: 1) to have a wide coverage of terms used in documents discussing economic concepts, and 2) to provide a human-annotated sentiment score in the range [-1,1]. The score is a useful feature when the interest is to weigh words by their sentiment content as opposed to categorizing terms in positive and negative. We illustrate the use of the EL in the context of a simple sentiment measure and consider several applications in economics. The comparison to other lexicons shows that the EL is superior due to its wider coverage of domain relevant terms and its more accurate categorization of the word sentiment.

Keywords: Economic dictionary, Semantic analysis, Textual analysis

JEL Classification: C55, D14, R11