A Comparative Analysis of Fine-Tuned LLMs and Few-Shot Learning of LLMs for Financial Sentiment Analysis

Financial sentiment analysis plays a crucial role in uncovering latent patterns and detecting emerging trends, enabling individuals to make well-informed decisions that may yield substantial advantages within the constantly changing realm of finance. Recently, LLMs have demonstrated their effectiveness in diverse domains, showcasing remarkable capabilities even in zero-shot and few-shot in-context learning for various NLP tasks. Nevertheless, their potential and applicability in the context of financial sentiment analysis have not been thoroughly explored yet. To bridge this gap, we employ two approaches: in-context learning (with a focus on gpt-3.5-turbo model) and fine-tuning LLMs on a finance-domain dataset. Given the computational costs associated with fine-tuning LLMs with large parameter sizes, our focus lies on smaller LLMs, spanning from 250M to 3B parameters for fine-tuning. We then compare the performances with state-of-the-art results to evaluate their effectiveness in the finance-domain. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuned smaller LLMs can achieve comparable performance to state-of-the-art fine-tuned LLMs, even with models having fewer parameters and a smaller training dataset. Additionally, the zero-shot and one-shot performance of LLMs produces comparable results with fine-tuned smaller LLMs and state-of-the-art outcomes. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that there is no observed enhancement in performance for finance-domain sentiment analysis when the number of shots for in-context learning is increased.