GOAT at the FinSim-2 task: Learning Word Representations of Financial Data with Customized Corpus

In this paper, we present our approaches for the FinSim 2021 Shared Task on Learning Semantic Similarities for the Financial Domain. The aim of the FinSim shared task is to automatically classify a given list of terms from the financial domain into the most relevant hypernym (or top-level) concept in an external ontology. Two different word representations have been compared in our study, i.e., customized word2vec provided by the shared task and FinBERT. We first create a customized corpus from the given prospectuses and relevant articles from Investopedia. Then we train the domain-specific word2vec embeddings using the customized data with customized word2vec and FinBERT as the initialized embeddings respectively. Our experimental results demonstrate that these customized word embeddings can effectively improve the classification performance and achieve better results than the direct utilization of the provided word embeddings. The class imbalance issue of the given data is also explored. We empirically study the classification performance by employing several different strategies for imbalanced classification problems. Our system ranks 2nd on both Average Accuracy and Mean Rank metrics.