EcoFinBench – a natural language processing benchmark for economics and finance

We introduce EcoFinBench, a natural language processing (NLP) benchmark suite for the domains of economics and finance. We comprehensively test a large array of NLP models across multiple domain-specific data sets for sentence classification. Specifically, we evaluate dictionary models, word count models, topic models, and modern transformer models. Furthermore, we introduce two new data sets to the research community. The Bluebook data set for text-only sentiment analysis in monetary policy, and the Greenbook data set for multimodal (text and numeric) sentiment analysis. We focus on data sets that require the models to work with relatively few data points and long average text lengths – typical characteristics of data sets in the economic and financial domain. We find that, dictionary models – still widely used as a default text analysis tool in economics and finance – underperform substantially across all evaluated data sets. From our findings, we conclude that given the underperformance of existing solutions in the multimodal domain, future modelling work is needed. With our benchmark suite we aim to lay the foundation for a systematic assessment on the most commonly used NLP models in economics and finance. To our knowledge, we are the first to provide such holistic benchmarking assessment for economics and finance.