An ontological artifact for classifying social media: Text mining analysis for financial data

In this paper we utilize a structured natural language processing implementation of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) to extract financial information from the unstructured textual data of the social media platform Twitter regarding financial and budget information in the public sector, namely the two public-private agencies of the Port Authority of NY and NJ (PANYNJ), and the NY Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA). This research initiative uses the Design Science Research (DSR) perspective to develop an artifact to classify tweets as being either relevant to financial bonds or not. We apply a frame and slot approach from the artificial intelligence and natural language processing literature to operationalize this artifact. FIBO provides standards for defining the facts, terms, and relationships associated with financial concepts. We show that FIBO grammar can be used to mine semantic meaning from unstructured textual data and that it provides a nuanced representation of structured financial data. With this artifact, social media such as Twitter may be accessed for the knowledge that its text contains about financial concepts using the FIBO ontology. This process is anticipated to be of interest to bond issuers, regulators, analysts, investors, and academics. It may also be extended towards other financial domains such as securities, derivatives, commodities, and banking that relate to FIBO ontologies, as well as more generally to develop a structured knowledge representation of unstructured data through the application of an ontology.