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Are Large Language Models Good In-context Learners for Financial Sentiment Analysis?

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  • Xinyu Wei
  • Luojia Liu

Abstract

Recently, large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have demonstrated the emergent ability, surpassing traditional methods in various domains even without fine-tuning over domain-specific data. However, when it comes to financial sentiment analysis (FSA)$\unicode{x2013}$a fundamental task in financial AI$\unicode{x2013}$these models often encounter various challenges, such as complex financial terminology, subjective human emotions, and ambiguous inclination expressions. In this paper, we aim to answer the fundamental question: whether LLMs are good in-context learners for FSA? Unveiling this question can yield informative insights on whether LLMs can learn to address the challenges by generalizing in-context demonstrations of financial document-sentiment pairs to the sentiment analysis of new documents, given that finetuning these models on finance-specific data is difficult, if not impossible at all. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper exploring in-context learning for FSA that covers most modern LLMs (recently released DeepSeek V3 included) and multiple in-context sample selection methods. Comprehensive experiments validate the in-context learning capability of LLMs for FSA.

Suggested Citation

  • Xinyu Wei & Luojia Liu, 2025. "Are Large Language Models Good In-context Learners for Financial Sentiment Analysis?," Papers 2503.04873, arXiv.org.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2503.04873
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    3. Tim Loughran & Bill Mcdonald, 2011. "When Is a Liability Not a Liability? Textual Analysis, Dictionaries, and 10‐Ks," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(1), pages 35-65, February.
    4. Manolis Maragoudakis & Dimitrios Serpanos, 2016. "Exploiting Financial News and Social Media Opinions for Stock Market Analysis using MCMC Bayesian Inference," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 47(4), pages 589-622, April.
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