Event Recognition Strategies applied in the Mercurio Project Davide Azzalini 1 , Fabio Azzalini 1 Davide Greco 2 , Mirjana Mazuran 1 , and Letizia Tanca 1 1 Politecnico di Milano {davide.azzalini|fabio.azzalini}@mail.polimi.it {mirjana.mazuran|letizia.tanca}@polimi.it 2 info@davidegreco.it Abstract. Mercurio is a project currently investigated at Politecnico di Milano whose aim is to support the decision-making process of financial investors. Mercurio identifies relevant events both from financial news articles and financial indexes and uses sequential pattern mining to pre- dict exceptional events given their past occurrences and relationships with other events. The process of event recognition, both from textual and numerical data sources, is crucial to successfully reach the goals. Investors constantly read financial news and analyze financial indexes, using their knowledge and experience to predict market events and make profitable investments. Mercurio [1, 2] aims at supporting this process by automatically extracting, from data freely available on the Web, events that influence and shake the market. Event recognition strategies are applied to both textual and numerical financial information. Textual data sources. Mercurio monitors Italian financial data sources such as Sole 24 Ore 3 , Corriere della Sera 4 , Radiocor 5 , etc. These data are processed according to different strategies: Semantic recognition. Events are recognized through semantic rules that formal- ize the knowledge of our domain expert. Rules define relationships between sentence structures and events; they are designed to capture meanings that go beyond the sole natural language processing since they recognize “hid- den” information inside the news, e.g. financial newspapers, usually, publish interviews when requested by a company: why would a company want to be interviewed? It seems that interviews are often published for reassuring investors in times of crisis. Classification. Often, data information sources specify, for each article, one or more categories, possibly hierarchical, it belongs to, e.g. articles about bal- ance, merge& acquisition, etc. These categories are mostly general-purpose 3 http://www.ilsole24ore.com/ 4 http://www.corriere.it/economia/ 5 http://www.radiocor.ilsole24ore.com/