Finance & Economics

Financial sentiment analysis (FSA) is crucial for evaluating market sentiment and making well-informed financial decisions. The advent of large language models (LLMs) such as BERT and its financial variant, FinBERT, has notably enhanced sentiment analysis capabilities. This paper investigates the application of LLMs and FinBERT for FSA, comparing their performance on news articles, financial reports and company announcements. The study emphasizes the advantages of prompt engineering with zero-sh...

Practitioners and researchers trying to strike a balance between accuracy and transparency center Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) at the junction of finance. This paper offers a thorough overview of the changing scene of XAI applications in finance together with domain-specific implementations, methodological developments, and trend mapping of research. Using bibliometric and content analysis, we find topic clusters, significant research, and most often used explainability strategies u...

Causal Inference plays an significant role in explaining the decisions taken by statistical models and artificial intelligence models. Of late, this field started attracting the attention of researchers and practitioners alike. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of 37 papers published during 1992-2023 and concerning the application of causal inference to banking, finance, and insurance. The papers are categorized according to the following families of domains: (i) Banking, (ii) Finance a...

In the financial domain, conducting entity-level sentiment analysis is crucial for accurately assessing the sentiment directed toward a specific financial entity. To our knowledge, no publicly available dataset currently exists for this purpose. In this work, we introduce an entity-level sentiment classification dataset, called \textbf{FinEntity}, that annotates financial entity spans and their sentiment (positive, neutral, and negative) in financial news. We document the dataset construction pr...

In financial markets, Graph Neural Networks have been successfully applied to modeling relational data, effectively capturing nonlinear inter-stock dependencies. Yet, existing models often fail to efficiently propagate messages during macroeconomic shocks. In this paper, we propose OmniGNN, an attention-based multi-relational dynamic GNN that integrates macroeconomic context via heterogeneous node and edge types for robust message passing. Central to OmniGNN is a sector node acting as a global i...

The success of artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning models in particular, has led to their widespread adoption across various industries due to their ability to process huge amounts of data and learn complex patterns. However, due to their lack of explainability, there are significant concerns regarding their use in critical sectors, such as finance and healthcare, where decision-making transparency is of paramount importance. In this paper, we provide a comparative survey of methods ...

There has been growing interest in applying NLP techniques in the financial domain, however, resources are extremely limited. This paper introduces StockEmotions, a new dataset for detecting emotions in the stock market that consists of 10,000 English comments collected from StockTwits, a financial social media platform. Inspired by behavioral finance, it proposes 12 fine-grained emotion classes that span the roller coaster of investor emotion. Unlike existing financial sentiment datasets, Stock...

Credit card fraud is a significant problem for financial institutions, resulting in substantial monetary loss each year. Fraud patterns and methods are continuously evolving, with fraudulent transactions often disguised to resemble legitimate activity. Real world transaction data for fraud detection is severely affected by class imbalance making it harder to detect these transactions. Fraudulent transactions are rarely isolated. Accounts, devices, and other common attributes are often shared acr...

Corporate fraud detection aims to automatically recognize companies that conduct wrongful activities such as fraudulent financial statements or illegal insider trading. Previous learning-based methods fail to effectively integrate rich interactions in the company network. To close this gap, we collect 18-year financial records in China to form three graph datasets with fraud labels. We analyze the characteristics of the financial graphs, highlighting two pronounced issues: (1) information overlo...

Fine-grained financial sentiment analysis on news headlines is a challenging task requiring human-annotated datasets to achieve high performance. Limited studies have tried to address the sentiment extraction task in a setting where multiple entities are present in a news headline. In an effort to further research in this area, we make publicly available SEntFiN 1.0, a human-annotated dataset of 10,753 news headlines with entity-sentiment annotations, of which 2,847 headlines contain multiple en...

The application of graph representation learning techniques to the area of financial risk management (FRM) has attracted significant attention recently. However, directly modeling transaction networks using graph neural models remains challenging: Firstly, transaction networks are directed multigraphs by nature, which could not be properly handled with most of the current off-the-shelf graph neural networks (GNN). Secondly, a crucial problem in FRM scenarios like anti-money laundering (AML) is t...

Financial fraud refers to the act of obtaining financial benefits through dishonest means. Such behavior not only disrupts the order of the financial market but also harms economic and social development and breeds other illegal and criminal activities. With the popularization of the internet and online payment methods, many fraudulent activities and money laundering behaviors in life have shifted from offline to online, posing a great challenge to regulatory authorities. How to efficiently dete...

We aim to enhance a price sentiment index and to more precisely understand price trends from the perspective of not only consumers but also businesses. We extract comments related to prices from the Economy Watchers Survey conducted by the Cabinet Office of Japan and classify price trends using a large language model (LLM). We classify whether the survey sample reflects the perspective of consumers or businesses, and whether the comments pertain to goods or services by utilizing information on t...

The risk of financial fraud is increasing as digital payments are used more and more frequently. Although the use of artificial intelligence systems for fraud detection is widespread, society and regulators have raised the standards for these systems' transparency for reliability verification purposes. To increase their effectiveness in conducting fraud investigations, fraud analysts also profit from having concise and understandable explanations. To solve these challenges, the paper will concen...

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used in financial fraud detection due to their excellent ability on handling graph-structured financial data and modeling multilayer connections by aggregating information of neighbors. However, these GNN-based methods focus on extracting neighbor-level information but neglect a global perspective. This paper presents the concept and calculation formula of Global Confidence Degree (GCD) and thus designs GCD-based GNN (GCD-GNN) that can address the challeng...

The stock market has become an increasingly popular investment option among new generations, with individuals exploring more complex assets. This rise in retail investors' participation necessitates a deeper understanding of the driving factors behind this trend and the role of financial literacy in enhancing investment decisions. This study aims to investigate how financial literacy influences financial decision-making and stock market participation. By identifying key barriers and motivators, ...

Graph representation learning methods have been widely adopted in financial applications to enhance company representations by leveraging inter-firm relationships. However, current approaches face three key challenges: (1) The advantages of relational information are obscured by limitations in downstream task designs; (2) Existing graph models specifically designed for stock prediction often suffer from excessive complexity and poor generalization; (3) Experience-based construction of corporate ...

In the financial field of the United States, the application of big data technology has become one of the important means for financial institutions to enhance competitiveness and reduce risks. The core objective of this article is to explore how to fully utilize big data technology to achieve complete integration of internal and external data of financial institutions, and create an efficient and reliable platform for big data collection, storage, and analysis. With the continuous expansion and...

Lexicon-based sentiment analysis (SA) in finance leverages specialized, manually annotated lexicons created by human experts to extract sentiment from financial texts. Although lexicon-based methods are simple to implement and fast to operate on textual data, they require considerable manual annotation efforts to create, maintain, and update the lexicons. These methods are also considered inferior to the deep learning-based approaches, such as transformer models, which have become dominant in va...

Significant progress has been made in automated problem-solving using societies of agents powered by large language models (LLMs). In finance, efforts have largely focused on single-agent systems handling specific tasks or multi-agent frameworks independently gathering data. However, the multi-agent systems' potential to replicate real-world trading firms' collaborative dynamics remains underexplored. TradingAgents proposes a novel stock trading framework inspired by trading firms, featuring LLM...