Economists at the Bank of England have developed an early indicator of economic growth by extracting information contained in newspaper articles.

Arthur Turrell, Nikoleta Anesti and Silvia Miranda-Agrippino use two separate algorithms to turn “news into numbers”, as they explain in a recent blog post. The first counts words based on a pre-defined dictionary of positive and negative terms, while the second uses machine learning to estimate which words are semantically similar to those in the