How headline sentiment labels work: the tone of words and what it leaves out

Next to each headline in Jupick's news list is a positive, negative or neutral badge. The badge does not come from reading the article body. It is purely the result of counting the words in the one-line headline.

The method is simple. A word list is set in advance with words often used in a positive sense (Korean words meaning rise, surge, strong performance, rebound and the like) and words often used in a negative sense (fall, plunge, concern, deficit and the like), and Jupick counts which side appears more often in the headline.

Article bodies are not stored, to reduce the copyright burden. Only the headline and the link are kept, and the tone is read from the headline alone. Entering a headline directly into the sentiment classifier tool shows exactly which words were matched within the sentence.

Some expressions read the opposite way if only single words are counted. A phrase meaning “concerns resolved” is a typical example. It contains the negative word “concerns,” but the meaning of the whole phrase is positive.

So the word list checks such phrases before single words. If “concerns resolved” appears in a headline, it is counted as positive, that part is removed from the sentence, and words are counted in what remains. Since it has been removed, the “concerns” inside it is not counted again as negative.

Phrases are treated as clearer signals and weighted more heavily than single words. This is so that cases where a whole expression, not a single word, sets the direction are not missed.

After counting positives and negatives, a headline with more positives is labeled positive and one with more negatives is labeled negative. If the two are equal, it is neutral.

A headline like “exchange rate rises vs oil prices fall,” where one positive word faces one negative word, is a tie and becomes neutral. That means it leans neither way, not that it contains no matched words.

A headline with no words from the list at all is also neutral. When there is no basis for judging tone, the headline is left neutral rather than forced into positive or negative.

Economic and international news feeds mix in political, social and everyday stories. Jupick keeps only headlines about the asset classes it covers: Korean stocks, US stocks, crypto, commodities and exchange rates.

This too is judged by keywords in the headline. If a headline contains none of the words that point to a market, such as KOSPI, Nasdaq, Bitcoin, oil prices or exchange rate, it is dropped from the list. Entering a headline without a market keyword into the sentiment classifier also returns a note that it is not classified as market news.

Standalone words with broad meanings that invite misreading, such as index and earnings, are deliberately excluded from the relevance check. This keeps everyday stories from being pulled in as market news by mistake.

This is the most important part. Positive and negative describe only the tone of the words in a headline. They are never a forecast of the price of that stock or market going up or down.

On a day an article is labeled positive, the price can fall, and on a day one is labeled negative, the price can rise. The badge says nothing about future prices and gives no trading advice. It only shows what tone of words the headline was written in.

The tone of news and the reaction of the market are separate matters. Reading them as the same thing means inventing a promise the badge never made.

Counting words is fast and transparent, but its limits are clear. It cannot properly read irony or sarcasm in headlines, expressions whose meaning is reversed by context, or new coinages not in the list.

Because only the headline is read and not the body, anything the headline does not carry stays out of the judgment. The same word can mean different things depending on the sector or the situation, and the word list does not know the difference.

So this badge is better seen not as a precise measure of sentiment but as a rough tone marker for scanning headlines quickly. The method is disclosed openly so that readers know how the label is produced and how far it can be relied on.

The sentiment badge only summarizes the tone of the words in the news. It does not say whether the news is correct, whether it matters, or how it might be reflected in prices.

A stock with many positive headlines is not a good stock, and one with many negative headlines is not a bad stock. Tone is not a ranking or a signal of the future; it is only the color of the vocabulary in a headline.

This content is for information only and is not investment advice. Jupick does not forecast future share prices and gives no trading advice of any kind. Investment decisions and responsibility for them rest with the user.