BERT for Stock Market Sentiment Analysis

When breaking news occurs, stock quotes can change abruptly in a matter of seconds. The human analysis of breaking news can take several minutes, and investors in the financial markets need to make quick decisions. Such challenging scenarios require faster ways to support investors. In this work, we propose the use of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to perform sentiment analysis of news articles and provide relevant information for decision making in the stock market. This model is pre-trained on a large amount of general-domain documents by means of a self-learning task. To fine-tune this powerful model on sentiment analysis for the stock market, we manually labeled stock news articles as positive, neutral or negative. This dataset is freely available and amounts to 582 documents from several financial news sources. We fine-tune a BERT model on this dataset and achieve 72.5% of F-score. Then, we perform some experiments highlighting how the output of the obtained model can provide valuable information to predict the subsequent movements of the Dow Jones Industrial (DJI) Index.