Why finance is deploying natural language processing

Three years into his stint teaching machine learning at MIT Sloan, finance lecturerMichael Shulman has just one complaint: It's hard to keep up. "It's such a fast-moving field, a lot of what's state-of-the-art now wasn't invented when I taught the course a year ago," he said. Officially titled Advanced Data Analytics and Machine Learning in Finance, the course reflects a move in finance, normally a tech-cautious industry, to embrace machine learning to help make faster, better-informed decisions. Specifically, financial analytics firms are turning to natural language processing to parse textual data hundreds of thousands of times faster and more accurately than humans can, said Shulman, head of machine learning at Kensho. A casual observer might assume financial data to be more numerical than textual, but Shulman said that's not the case.