Abstract
Financial scandals are prominently covered by the media, during which time the media becomes heavily involved in condemning the perpetrators. The language used to describe these scandals is often laden with negative sentiment, and much of this language carries ethical connotations. In this paper we explore the relationship between the use of emotive words and ethical words, focussing on financial crimes. Using the Enron Corporation as a case study, we show that evaluative terms describing things that are positive or negative are correlated with moral terms describing things that are virtuous or vicious. To explore the impact of these moral terms, we conduct a time series analysis and investigate the effect in changes of moral terms on Enron’s share price.
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Acknowledgements
This research is supported by Science Foundation Ireland through the CNGL Programme (Grant 07/CE/I1142) in the ADAPT Centre (www.adaptcentre.ie) at Trinity College, University of Dublin. In this study we used the sentiment analysis system Rocksteady, developed as part of the Faireacháin project for monitoring, evaluating and predicting behaviour of markets and communities (2009–2011). Support for Rocksteady’s development was provided by Trinity College, University of Dublin and Enterprise Ireland (Grant #IP-2009-0595).
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Cook, J.A., Ahmad, K. (2015). Behaviour and Markets: The Interaction Between Sentiment Analysis and Ethical Values?. In: Jackowski, K., Burduk, R., Walkowiak, K., Wozniak, M., Yin, H. (eds) Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning – IDEAL 2015. IDEAL 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9375. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24834-9_64
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24834-9_64
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