Stock market prediction using natural language processing
Filed in the bag-of-words era of natural language processing, this patent expired on its own timeline right before large language models made 'read the news, trade the sentiment' a mainstream idea.
Assignee: Fred Herz Patents, LLC · Filed 2002-01-22 · Granted 2012-10-09 · Fee lapsed 2024-11-11 · Term end (est.) 2022-01-22
US8285619 was filed January 22, 2002 and granted a decade later, in October 2012 — an unusually long prosecution. Its twenty-year term from filing ran out on its own anniversary: January 22, 2022.
ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022 — ten months after this patent's term ended. For two decades, 'apply natural language processing to news text to predict market moves' sat behind a patent claim written when NLP meant hand-built rules and word counts, not anything resembling a modern language model. It went free just before the tool that would have made the underlying idea trivial to build arrived.
This patent has a full working resurrection, not just a write-up: see the grave at /graves/news-sentiment-signals, a sentiment-driven signal backtester built on exactly the mechanic this filing described.