Understanding the influence of news on society decision making: application to economic policy uncertainty

The abundance of digital documents offers a valuable chance to gain insights into public opinion, social structure, and dynamics. However, the scale and volume of these digital collections makes manual analysis approaches extremely costly and not scalable. In this paper, we study the potential of using automated methods from natural language processing and machine learning, in particular weak supervision strategies, to understand how news influence decision making in society. Besides proposing a weak supervision solution for the task, which replaces manual labeling to a certain extent, we propose an improvement of a recently published economic index. This index is known as economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index and has been shown to correlate to indicators such as firm investment, employment, and excess market returns. In summary, in this paper, we present an automated data efficient approach based on weak supervision and deep learning ( BERT + WS ) for identification of news articles about economical uncertainty and adapt the calculation of EPU to the proposed strategy. Experimental results reveal that our approach ( BERT + WS ) improves over the baseline method centered in keyword search, which is currently used to construct the EPU index. The improvement is over 20 points in precision, reducing the false positive rate typical to the use of keywords.