Text became a mainstream data source for quant research in three waves: dictionary-based sentiment scoring of news and filings, supervised NLP on earnings calls and social media, and — since 2023 — large language models used for everything from extracting signals to simulating analysts. This hub tracks all three, with the LLM wave now dominating new submissions.

The evaluation bar shifts with each wave, and it’s worth knowing where it currently stands: for LLM-based trading papers, the critical flaw to check is temporal leakage — a model whose training data includes the test period’s news has seen the future, and many published backtests fail exactly this test. The papers ranked highest below either use point-in-time text data with pre-cutoff models or study tasks (extraction, classification, summarization quality) where leakage doesn’t invalidate the result. Sentiment-signal decay is the other recurring theme: documented text signals fade fast once published.

Related hubs: Machine Learning for Forecasting, Crypto Markets & DeFi, Factor Investing.