Impact Analysis of Social Events on Industries through Narrative Causal Search

This study focuses on discovering the ripple effects on firms of significant external events such as pandemics, resource price spikes, and natural disasters. We construct a system that presents a chain of other economic events derived from one event by extracting descriptions of causal relationships from a large amount of text data. The objective of this study is to construct a causal chain presentation system that takes into account the diversity of outputs to discover broader economic ripple effects. To accomplish this goal, we develop a new algorithm that uses Maximal Marginal Relevance to represent causal chains. Experiments using Japanese financial statement summaries confirm that this approach produces a greater variety of outputs without sacrificing accuracy. This innovative approach provides a more comprehensive understanding of how external events impact firms and their financial performance.