Sentiment can be found in places other than text-based language. We introduce an academic paper that correlates market sentiment with news article photos and consider whether or not multimodal sentiment analysis (derived from audio, images, video) has a future in the landscape of alternative data. 

SETTING THE SCENE

Sentiment analysis is just one application of Natural Language Processing (NLP). For those who are still new to this world, we would point you towards (1) our primer on NLP applications in alternative data, as well as perhaps (2) this academic survey on natural language in financial forecasting:

For those who are ready to dive into slightly deeper waters, let us first admit that sentiment analysis is one of the more intuitive applications from the realm of alt data, despite the fact that a reign of black-box technologies has contributed to a general sense of suspicion towards the generative methodology.