Retail investor sentiment analysis

Unlocking financial insights with fine-tuned FinBERT

In the fast-paced world of finance, staying ahead requires an understanding of both the data and the sentiment behind the feedback. This is where fine-tuning FinBERT comes into play. BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) has revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) with its deep understanding of context in text. FinBERT, a derivative of BERT from Hugging Face, is pre-trained on financial texts, making it uniquely equipped to parse the complexities of financial jargon and sentiment. The real magic happens when we fine-tune FinBERT for a specific task, like sentiment analysis of retail investors.

Why use FinBERT with GPU-accelerated compute?

  • FinBERT: Fine-tuning is the process of taking a pre-trained model and training it further on a specialized dataset to refine its capabilities. For FinBERT, our template uses a dataset of 4,837 financial news headlines, each labeled with sentiments—positive, negative, or neutral—from a retail investor’s perspective. This fine-tuning step tailors the model to the specific nuances and contexts of financial sentiment, transforming it from a general-purpose language model to a domain expert.
  • NVIDIA GPUs: Fine-tuning large language models like FinBERT is a computationally intensive process. This is where GPU-accelerated backends from NVIDIA come into play. GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are designed to handle the massive parallel computations required for training deep learning models. This template shows how, in a Domino environment, NVIDIA's GPUs can be leveraged to demonstrate GPU-accelerated fine turning. This is advantageous because it allows for behavioral fine-tuning to be relatively cheap and quick to accomplish, especially if distributed and GPU-accelerated compute can be employed in the process as shown in our template.
  • Streamlit output or API: Streamlit allows for the development of a web-based interface where users can input financial news headlines and receive immediate sentiment analysis. This makes the model accessible to non-technical users who can benefit from sentiment insights in real time without needing to understand the underlying code. Alternatively, an API can be integrated via a JSON schema into your existing financial platforms, tools, and workflows, allowing for seamless, scalable integration. This means that businesses can enhance and automate their current systems with minimal disruption. Both options can provide flexibility and display the information your team values.

Fine-tuning FinBERT for financial sentiment analysis is more than just a technical exercise; it’s a leap towards smarter, scalable, and more informed financial decision-making. This project exemplifies the potential of combining cutting-edge NLP models with domain-specific data to create powerful, user-friendly, and customizable tools. Through this python-based jupyter notebook or script, the model can be interacted with via a custom streamlit web application. With this template code your team can learn to import libraries, check GPU acceleration availability, load a csv dataset, prepare training, test and validation subsets, fine-tune a model, and output an accuracy metric. Whether you’re a data scientist or a financial professional, this template project offers a compelling glimpse into the future of AI financial analysis.

View the repo