The European Union is backing a new research project bidding to extract relevant financial information from the vast amounts of unstructured data on the World Wide Web.
The three year First project aims to harness artificial intelligence to find information on the Internet that can then be used to support financial decision makers.
It is being run by a consortium of eight European partners, including Boerse Stuttgart, from Germany, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain and has a EUR4.57 million budget co-funded by the EU.
The group argues that there are currently extreme challenges dealing with vast and constantly growing amounts of heterogeneous data and information in financial markets in real-time.
While market participants, as well as regulators, rely on their ability to quickly extract and interpret relevant information, their existing tools struggle to deliver.
The project aims to enable the extraction of relevant information from data sources such as news sites, blogs and bulletin boards, in real-time.
Using online sentiment analysis, event detection and prediction, a semantic knowledge base will be built to help identify relevant information to use in financial decision models covering reputational risk, market surveillance and online retail banking and brokerage.