topic Re: Reading text and creating dummy variables. in SAS Programming

Reading text and creating dummy variables.

shalmali — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 02:29:56 GMT

Dear All,

I have a dataset with the following information: AnnouncementDate, company, Description. Announcement date is the date when company announced changed of their CEO. In my sample I have some companies announcing the resignation of their CEO and some companies announcing appointment of their CEO. The "Description" provides information on what announcement was made by the company. I want to create two columns: ResignCEOCo takes value 1 if the Company announced resignation of CEO and AppointCEOCo takes value 1 if company announced appointment of CEO. Is there any SAS code that would read the description and create the dummy variables? If yes, can someone please share with me the codes?

My current dataset looks as follows:

companyname	announcedate	Description
Park City Group Inc.	15628	Park City Group Names New Acting Chief Financial Officer
Petroleum Geo Services ASA	15628	Petroleum Geo-Services Changes Chief Financial Officer
Richtree Inc.	16006	Richtree Announces Resignation of Colin West as Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Identive Group, Inc.	15658	SCM Microsystems Inc. elected Andrew Warner as Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer
Euronet Worldwide Inc.	15641	Euronet Worldwide Introduces Chief Financial Officer and Office of Controller
MediSolution Ltd.	15641	MediSolution Announces New Chief Financial Officer
First Aviation Services Inc.	16005	First Aviation Services Inc. Names New Chief Financial Officer
Molex Inc.	15993	Molex Announces First Quarter 2003 Financial Results; Announces Second Quarter 2003 Earnings Guidance; Names Diane Bullock As Chief Financial Officer
Firestone Ventures Inc.	16001	Firestone Ventures Announces Appointment of Chief Financial Officer

I want my new dataset to look as follows:

companyname	announcedate	ResigCEOCo	AppointCeoCo
Park City Group Inc.	15628	0	1
Petroleum Geo Services ASA	15628	0	1
Richtree Inc.	16006	1	0
Identive Group, Inc.	15658	0	1
Euronet Worldwide Inc.	15641	0	1
MediSolution Ltd.	15641	0	1
First Aviation Services Inc.	16005	0	1
Molex Inc.	15993	0	0
Firestone Ventures Inc.	16001	0	1

Thank you for your time.

Re: Reading text and creating dummy variables.

RichardinOz — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 02:47:00 GMT

We only have one example of a resignation in the data so this suggestion is interim:

First search for keywords such as President, Chief or Vice. If not found, return 0 for both columns

Probably exclude any row that has result in it

Next look for the string Resig. If found, assume it is a resignation

Other wise assume it is an appointment

I would suggest you need thousands of rows of data to fine tune the algorithms

Richard in Oz

Re: Reading text and creating dummy variables.

Doc_Duke — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 02:51:17 GMT

Your new dataset does not look like your narrative. None of the sample announcements were for CEO. Also, Molex did name a new CFO, why was that not included.

Beyond those details, I am assuming that you do NOT have SAS text miner licensed. It is designed to answer just this sort of question.

Without it, you are going to have to write a lot of fairly tedious if-then-else logic in a DATA step to heuristically pull these codes out, and every time you get a new set of data, you will have to review the code.

Re: Reading text and creating dummy variables.

shalmali — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 03:16:24 GMT

Sorry guys, I meant resignation and appointment of CFO and not CEO.