Exploring the Potential of Internet News for Supply Risk Assessment of Metals

Abstract

The growth in demand for material resources is inevitable to maintain sustainable development. Especially for metallic minerals, this growth in demand increases the supply risk; therefore, its evaluation is essential to keep the resource supply stable. Supply risk assessment has a long history in both academic and practical studies, but there is no existing study using internet news as its main information source. In this study, we obtained related news articles from S&P Global Market Intelligence (SPG) and used them for the supply risk analysis. Using already topic-labeled articles and a gradient boosting framework, non-labeled articles are also labeled and categorized by topic. The articles were assigned to metallic minerals by SPG. We also scored each article using simple sentiment analysis. In short, we found significant potential in internet news articles as information for complementary assessments to existing methods, by providing in-depth information on regulatory or corporate financial activities, which are difficult to cover using the existing numerical indices. While it is useful, it should be noted that the volume of news articles depends on the interests of their readers, and many articles capture changes rather than states. As long as they are used with these caveats in mind, news articles can be very useful as a complementary source of information to existing analytical methods, especially for short-term supply risk assessment.