William Beckhauser

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Financial News Classification Using Language Learning Models and Reinforcement Learning

Financial News Classification

Financial News Classification Using Language Learning Models and Reinforcement Learning

This study examines the application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in conjunction with Large Language Models (LLMs) for the multi-label classification of financial news. The research evaluates models of different scales, including GPT-4, Llama3 8B, and Llama3 70B, across two scenarios:(1) classification using only the query and corpus without RL, and (2) classification incorporating RL. A dataset consisting of 111,000 financial news articles was constructed through web scraping, with a sample of 1,000 articles manually labeled into three impact categories: weak, semi-strong, and strong. The experimental results demonstrate that smaller models, such as Llama3 8B, exhibit improved accuracy and coverage when RL is applied. However, larger models like GPT-4 displayed reduced performance under RL, suggesting challenges in adapting larger architectures for this task.

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