. (2023). “CrudeBERT: Applying Economic Theory towards Fine-Tuning Transformer-based Sentiment Analysis Models to the Crude Oil Market”. 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Prague, Czech Republik
Predicting market movements based on the sentiment of news media has a long tradition in data analysis. With advances in natural language processing, transformer architectures have emerged that enable contextually aware sentiment classification. Nevertheless, current methods built for the general financial market such as FinBERT cannot distinguish asset-specific value-driving factors. This paper addresses this shortcoming by presenting a method that identifies and classifies events that impact supply and demand in the crude oil futures markets within a large corpus of relevant news headlines. We then introduce CrudeBERT, a new sentiment analysis model that draws upon these events to contextualize and fine-tune FinBERT, therefore, providing improved sentiment classifications of headlines covering developments in the crude oil market. We then perform an extensive evaluation that demonstrates that CrudeBERT significantly outperforms competing systems in the crude oil domain.