Language barrier: quants slog to teach investing bots to read

Training models to interpret text can be dull; doing it badly can be costly

When Microsoft launched its chatbot Tay in 2016, the inputs from users notoriously steered the bot into spewing out hate speech. Tay was hurriedly bundled offline – and has yet to reappear.

Now, like so many in the vanguard of artificial intelligence, investment managers are busy trying to teach their bots the nuances of interpreting text – but, like the tech giant, their journey to success is set to be a long one.

NLP, or natural language processing, is a buzzy area in investing. Buy-side