Finavistory: Using Narrative Visualization to Explain Social and Economic Relationships in Financial News
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FinaVistory: Using Narrative Visualization to Explain Social and Economic Relationships in Financial News Yeuk-Yin CHAN and Huamin QU Department of Computer Science and Engineering The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology [email protected], [email protected] Abstract—When reading financial news, although there are versatile and open end. For example, economists may want critics explaining the fluctuation of Economic indexes in articles to find out the economic relationships between oil price and everyday, the news often assert bias on authors’ favorite opinions. inflation while some others may want to find out the political On the other hand, the amount of financial news published these days is staggering with diversified opinions on the same causes affecting oil price. Visual analytics here are meant to issues. Unless with acumen for the whole environment, audience bring out a whole story rather than just giving explanation to will find hard to stay objective and identify useful information a particular concern. Therefore, narrative visualization plays from the mass media. If computer is granted ability to analyze a good role in this area. Once a general intended narrative is all news and generate a narrative that addresses all concerns complete, the visualization opens up to a reader-driven stage related to the news, all kinds of readers can obtain a more compelling story. Nowadays, Narrative Visualization is a popular where the user is free to interactively explore the data, thus technique for news media to deliver reader driven stories, and a fulfill their individual purposes [1]. potential field for application side. In this paper, we first identify In this paper, we identify the key settings of financial news: financial news with two features: polarity associated with each reasons for Economic index changes and impacts on/from it. news and, factors impacting the indexes or being impacted by To address these settings we classify each news article into the indexes. Then we apply these features to explain the price fluctuation and explain the Socio-economic relationships between three attributes: positive news (news about index increase), price and different topics. Finally, two case studies are conducted negative news (news about index decrease) and impact news to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of FinaVistory in (news about impacts on/from index change). Then we generate helping users with different purposes to understand the stories several visualization results across the narrative based on the behind Europe unemployment after 2008 financial crisis and oil classifications to address the concerns for the key settings. price in 2014. To verify our results, we incorporate economic equations Index Terms—Narrative Visualization, FinaVistory, Social and Economic Effects, Text Mining and actual outcome to tell the stories that people are most interested in around the main topics in our demonstration. In summary, the major contributions of this paper are: I. INTRODUCTION 1. Introduce a way of standard and automatic narrative Data visualization techniques nowadays provide mainstream visualization for satisfying the understanding of financial and news organizations new ways to deliver journalism informa- economic information and relationship with different motiva- tion from large amount of data. Text and statistics data now tions included but not limited to investing, economic and social can be turned into diagrams and charts to convey messages. On purposes, without the need of human processing unlike the top of that, the goal of visualization is to provide a backdrop of current practice. stories, as well as to provide powerful vehicle for discovering 2. Identify the attributes of financial news and methodolo- stories [1]. gies to extract useful information from these attributes. At the same time, financial analysts research macroeco- 3. Examine popular main topics in the field of Economics nomic and microeconomic conditions along with company and Finance under a simple work flow to emphasize simplicity fundamentals to make business, sector and industry recom- in analyzing complex environment. mendations. When they receive information from the financial news they also need to make judgment on different opinions II. RELATED WORK in order to stay objective on the issue [2]. In general, current research works have demonstrated vari- In the field of data visualization, there are visualization ous visualization techniques to visualize financial information. techniques to demonstrate a good use for satisfying a single For example, a bubble motion chart and radar word frequency purpose such as visualizing frauds, explaining market volatility chart are used to uncover relationships between news headlines or detecting trader sentiments. However, in case of Economic that can convey meaning about trader sentiment, and their research on financial news, the purposes are much more influence on stock prices [3]. WireVis, a visualization system 978-1-4673-8796-5/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE 32 BigComp 2016 Fig. 1. Sample interface of FinaVistory visualizing oil price news in 2014 and EU Unemployment during 2008-14. Apart from the main theme showing the percentage difference and time domain of the price, users can explore different reasons behind the fluctuation, impacts on or from the change and relationships with different Economic indicators. of categorical, time-varying data from financial transactions are more probably about behavioral finance, in which how has been used by Bank of America to detect transaction media frame the investment decisions can condition financial frauds [4]. Moreover, financial news topics generated by topic decisions [9]. Studies have also been done on the effects modeling can be used to explain market volatility [5]. While of financial communications and conceptualize the effects in these research works focus on delivering insights for particular terms of impression management [10]. Thus narratives play an financial activities, our visualization work focuses on giving important role in directing investor sentiment, consequently more versatile insights including but not limited to social, affecting the volatility and expectation in financial market economic and financial scenarios. also. These works, however, focuses on exploring the narrative To be more specific, there are research works focusing on components in financial scenarios only, in which to make visualizing news articles, story telling on financial information people better understand the meanings behind, we explore the and text visualization. potentials of narrative visualization in our work. A. News Visualization C. Data Visualization on Relationship and Keyword Previous work has done for visualization of large amount For visualizing relationships or specific topics on a time, of new stories. Examples are Contexter [6], a system using many tools have been developed. Wordle [11] [12] and Tag manual extraction rules (i.e. extracting capitalized words) and Cloud [13] are popular tools visualizing the significance of statistics (i.e. comparing shared documents) to visualize a certain keywords by using different front sizes, colors, etc. network of news topics, Newsmap, a hierarchical knowledge On the other hand, force-directed layout [14] can be used to map generated by SOM categorization can be used as a tool visualize modularity clusters [15]. However, since these indi- for browsing business intelligence and medical knowledge vidual tools are only generalized to cope with a broad usage hidden in news articles [7], and TextWheel , which uses a of visualization, we now aim at providing a comprehensive combination of keyword wheels, document transportation belt, sets of visual presentation to let users understand the matters and dynamic glyphs to convey messages behind the dynamic in a holistic way. natures of news streams [8]. The approaches demonstrated are price-performance effective and are good examples to III. OVERVIEW emphasize the importance of data preprocessing. Compared A. Research Problems with these research works, our belief on financial news is that they contain unique attributes apart from general news. Thus Our motivation is that, there is little attention focusing on our works aim at providing tailor-made methods for financial combining all the above-mentioned research field. However, news processing and visual representations. there are already plenty of financial findings, well-defined narrative structures and visual tools available nowadays, and B. Narratives and Financial Activities researchers are looking at the opportunities to extend visual Based on Efficient Market Hypothesis, stock prices rapidly analysis applications to enable storytelling too [1]. Thus we and perfectly incorporate financial information in a short combine the knowledge of these fields to design a system to time. Therefore, what actually causes the discourse of market answer questions that can be possibly arisen from fluctuations 33 of the Economic indexes. In particularly the domain of narra- between the nodes. Nodes with more complex network will tive visualization, we are answering these questions: be shown in a more inside cluster in the diagram too. 1. How to establish a narrative flow of visualizations to al- low multi-messaging from different ordering and combinations of features in the system? 2. What is the essential information that needs to be extracted from financial news to explain all the socio-economic problems and concerns? B. Our System We developed a visualization system,