Predicting Abnormal Bank Stock Returns Using Textual Analysis of Annual Reports - a Neural Network Approach

This paper aims to extract both sentiment and bag-of-words information from the annual reports of U.S. banks. The sentiment analysis is based on two commonly used finance-specific dictionaries, while the bag-of-words are selected according to their tf-idf. We combine these features with financial indicators to predict abnormal bank stock returns using a neural network with dropout regularization and rectified linear units. We show that this method outperforms other machine learning algorithms (Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, C4.5 decision tree, and k-nearest neighbour classifier) in predicting positive/negative abnormal stock returns. Thus, this neural network seems to be well suited for text classification tasks working with sparse high-dimensional data. We also show that the quality of the prediction significantly increased when using the combination of financial indicators and bigrams and trigrams, respectively.