This paper discusses the "Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis on Financial Microblogs and News" task as part of SemEval-2017, specifically under the "Detecting sentiment, humour, and truth" theme. This task contains two tracks, where the first one concerns Microblog messages and the second one covers News Statements and Headlines. The main goal behind both tracks was to predict the sentiment score for each of the mentioned companies/stocks. The sentiment scores for each text instance adopted floating point values in the range of -1 (very negative/bearish) to 1 (very positive/bullish), with 0 designating neutral sentiment. This task attracted a total of 32 participants, with 25 participating in Track 1 and 29 in Track 2.

The growing maturity of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and resources is dramatically changing the landscape of many application domains which are dependent on the analysis of unstructured data at scale. The finance domain, with its reliance on the interpretation of multiple unstructured and structured data sources and its demand for fast and comprehensive decision making is already emerging as a primary ground for the experimentation of NLP, Web Mining and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques for the automatic analysis of financial news and opinions online. This challenge focuses on advancing the state-of-the-art of aspect-based sentiment analysis and opinion-based Question Answering for the financial domain. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Retrieval models and ranking; • Computing methodologies → Natural language processing;

This paper focuses on the use of technology in language learning. Language training requires the need to group learners homogeneously and to provide them with instant feedback on their productions such as errors [8, 15, 17] or proficiency levels. A possible approach is to assess writings from students and assign them with a level. This paper analyses the possibility of automatically predicting Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) language levels on the basis of manually annotated errors in a written learner corpus [9, 11]. The research question is to evaluate the predictive power of errors in terms of levels and to identify which error types appear to be criterial features in determining interlanguage stages. Results show that specific errors such as punctuation, spelling and verb tense are significant at specific CEFR levels.

This paper focuses on automatically assessing language proficiency levels according to linguistic complexity in learner English. We implement a supervised learning approach as part of an automatic essay scoring system. The objective is to uncover Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) criterial features in writings by learners of English as a foreign language. Our method relies on the concept of microsystems with features related to learner-specific linguistic systems in which several forms operate paradigmatically. Results on internal data show that different microsystems help classify writings from A1 to C2 levels (82% balanced accuracy). Overall results on external data show that a combination of lexical, syntactic, cohesive and accuracy features yields the most efficient classification across several corpora (59.2% balanced accuracy).

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