Extracting meta-information by using network analysis tools

This paper has been developed in the frame of the European project BLUE-ETS (Economic and Trade Statistics), in the work-package devoted to propose new tools for collecting and analyzing data. In order to obtain business information by documentary repositories, we refer to documents produced with nonstatistical aims. The use of secondary sources, typical of data and text mining, is an opportunity not sufficiently explored by National Statistical Institutes. The use of textual data is still viewed as too problematic, because of the complexity and the expensiveness of the pre-processing procedures and often for the lack of suitable analytical tools. In this paper we pay attention to the problems related to the pre-processing procedures, mainly concerning with semantic tagging. We propose a semi-automatic strategy based on network analysis tools to create financial-economic meta-information useful for the semantic annotation of the terms.