Assessing Banks' Distress Using News and Regular Financial Data.

In this paper, we focus our attention on leveraging the information contained in financial news to enhance the performance of a bank distress classifier. The news information should be analyzed and inserted into the predictive model in the most efficient way and this task deals with the issues related to Natural Language interpretation and to the analysis of news media. Among the different models proposed for such purpose, we investigate a deep learning approach. The methodology is based on a distributed representation of textual data obtained from a model (Doc2Vec) that maps the documents and the words contained within a text onto a reduced latent semantic space. Afterwards, a second supervised feed forward fully connected neural network is trained combining news data distributed representations with standard financial figures in input. The goal of the model is to classify the corresponding banks in distressed or tranquil state. The final aim is to comprehend both the improvement of the predictive performance of the classifier and to assess the importance of news data in the classification process. This to understand if news data really bring useful information not contained in standard financial variables.

Exploring Biomolecular Literature with EVEX: Connecting Genes through Events, Homology, and Indirect Associations.

Technological advancements in the field of genetics have led not only to an abundance of experimental data, but also caused an exponential increase of the number of published biomolecular studies. Text mining is widely accepted as a promising technique to help researchers in the life sciences deal with the amount of available literature. This paper presents a freely available web application built on top of 21.3 million detailed biomolecular events extracted from all PubMed abstracts. These text mining results were generated by a state-of-the-art event extraction system and enriched with gene family associations and abstract generalizations, accounting for lexical variants and synonymy. The EVEX resource locates relevant literature on phosphorylation, regulation targets, binding partners, and several other biomolecular events and assigns confidence values to these events. The search function accepts official gene/protein symbols as well as common names from all species. Finally, the web application is a powerful tool for generating homology-based hypotheses as well as novel, indirect associations between genes and proteins such as coregulators.