In this paper, we present CrudeOilNews, a corpus of English Crude Oil news for event extraction. It is the first of its kind for Commodity News and serves to contribute towards resource building for economic and financial text mining. This paper describes the data collection process, the annotation methodology, and the event typology used in producing the corpus. Firstly, a seed set of 175 news articles were manually annotated, of which a subset of 25 news was used as the adjudicated reference test set for inter-annotator and system evaluation. The inter-annotator agreement was generally substantial, and annotator performance was adequate, indicating that the annotation scheme produces consistent event annotations of high quality. Subsequently, the dataset is expanded through (1) data augmentation and (2) Human-in-the-loop active learning. The resulting corpus has 425 news articles with approximately 11k events annotated. As part of the active learning process, the corpus was used to train basic event extraction models for machine labeling; the resulting models also serve as a validation or as a pilot study demonstrating the use of the corpus in machine learning purposes. The annotated corpus is made available for academic research purpose at https://github.com/meisin/CrudeOilNews-Corpus

Event extraction in commodity news is a less researched area as compared to generic event extraction. However, accurate event extraction from commodity news is useful in abroad range of applications such as under-standing event chains and learning event-event relations, which can then be used for commodity price prediction. The events found in commodity news exhibit characteristics different from generic events, hence posing a unique challenge in event extraction using existing methods. This paper proposes an effective use of Graph Convolutional Networks(GCN) with a pruned dependency parse tree, termed contextual sub-tree, for better event ex-traction in commodity news. The event ex-traction model is trained using feature embed-dings from ComBERT, a BERT-based masked language model that was produced through domain-adaptive pre-training on a commodity news corpus. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed solution, which out-performs existing methods with F1 scores as high as 0.90. Furthermore, our pre-trained language model outperforms GloVe by 23%, and BERT and RoBERTa by 7% in terms of argument roles classification. For the goal of re-producibility, the code and trained models are made publicly available.

One of the important tasks in opinion mining is to extract aspects of the opinion target. Aspects are features or characteristics of the opinion target that are being reviewed, which can be categorised into explicit and implicit aspects. Extracting aspects from opinions is essential in order to ensure accurate information about certain attributes of an opinion target is retrieved. For instance, a professional camera receives a positive feedback in terms of its functionalities in a review, but its overly high price receives negative feedback. Most of the existing solutions focus on explicit aspects. However, sentences in reviews normally do not state the aspects explicitly. In this research, two hybrid models are proposed to identify and extract both explicit and implicit aspects, namely TDM-DC and TDM-TED. The proposed models combine topic modelling and dictionary-based approach. The models are unsupervised as they do not require any labelled dataset. The experimental results show that TDM-DC achieves F1-measure of 58.70%, where it outperforms both the baseline topic model and dictionary-based approach. In comparison to other existing unsupervised techniques, the proposed models are able to achieve higher F1-measure by approximately 3%. Although the supervised techniques perform slightly better, the proposed models are domain-independent, and hence more versatile.