Term Expansion and FinBERT fine-tuning for Hypernym and Synonym Ranking of Financial Terms
This addresses domain-specific NLP tasks for the financial industry, with incremental improvements through data augmentation and fine-tuning.
The paper tackled hypernym and synonym ranking for financial terms by fine-tuning FinBERT and augmenting data from sources like DBpedia and FIBO, achieving an accuracy of 0.917 and rank of 1.156 in the FinSim-3 shared task.
Hypernym and synonym matching are one of the mainstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present systems that attempt to solve this problem. We designed these systems to participate in the FinSim-3, a shared task of FinNLP workshop at IJCAI-2021. The shared task is focused on solving this problem for the financial domain. We experimented with various transformer based pre-trained embeddings by fine-tuning these for either classification or phrase similarity tasks. We also augmented the provided dataset with abbreviations derived from prospectus provided by the organizers and definitions of the financial terms from DBpedia [Auer et al., 2007], Investopedia, and the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO). Our best performing system uses both FinBERT [Araci, 2019] and data augmentation from the afore-mentioned sources. We observed that term expansion using data augmentation in conjunction with semantic similarity is beneficial for this task and could be useful for the other tasks that deal with short phrases. Our best performing model (Accuracy: 0.917, Rank: 1.156) was developed by fine-tuning SentenceBERT [Reimers et al., 2019] (with FinBERT at the backend) over an extended labelled set created using the hierarchy of labels present in FIBO.