FinBERT-Multilingual

A multilingual extension of the FinBERT paradigm: domain-adapted transformer for financial sentiment classification across six languages (EN, ZH, JA, DE, FR, ES).

While the original FinBERT demonstrated the effectiveness of domain-specific pre-training for English financial NLP, this model extends that approach to a multilingual setting using XLM-RoBERTa-base as the backbone, enabling cross-lingual financial sentiment analysis without language-specific models.

Model Architecture

• Base model: xlm-roberta-base (278M parameters)
• Task: 3-class sequence classification (Negative / Neutral / Positive)
• Domain adaptation: Task-Adaptive Pre-Training (TAPT) via Masked Language Modeling on 35K+ financial texts
• Languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish

Training Pipeline

Stage 1: Task-Adaptive Pre-Training (TAPT)

Following Gururangan et al. (2020), we perform continued MLM pre-training on the unlabeled financial corpus to adapt the model's representations to the financial domain. This stage exposes the model to domain-specific vocabulary and discourse patterns across all six target languages using approximately 35,000 financial text samples.

Stage 2: Supervised Fine-Tuning

The domain-adapted model is then fine-tuned on the labeled sentiment classification task.

Hyperparameters:

Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWA): Rather than selecting a single best checkpoint, we average the weights of the top-3 performing checkpoints. This produces a flatter loss minimum and more robust generalization, particularly beneficial for multilingual settings where overfitting to dominant languages is a risk.

Label smoothing (0.1): Prevents overconfident predictions and improves calibration, which is important for financial applications where prediction confidence informs downstream decisions.

Evaluation Results

Overall Metrics

Per-Class Performance

The balanced per-class performance (all F1 scores at 0.81) indicates that the model does not exhibit significant class bias, despite the imbalanced training distribution (Neutral: 45.5%, Positive: 30.8%, Negative: 23.7%).

Usage

from transformers import pipeline

classifier = pipeline("text-classification", model="Kenpache/finbert-multilingual")

# English
classifier("The company reported record quarterly earnings, driven by strong demand.")
# [{'label': 'positive', 'score': 0.95}]

# German
classifier("Die Aktie verlor nach der Gewinnwarnung deutlich an Wert.")
# [{'label': 'negative', 'score': 0.92}]

# Japanese
classifier("同社の売上高は前年同期比で横ばいとなった。")
# [{'label': 'neutral', 'score': 0.88}]

# Chinese
classifier("该公司宣布大规模裁员计划，股价应声下跌。")
# [{'label': 'negative', 'score': 0.91}]

Direct Model Loading

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForSequenceClassification
import torch

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Kenpache/finbert-multilingual")
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained("Kenpache/finbert-multilingual")

text = "Les bénéfices du groupe ont augmenté de 15% au premier trimestre."
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt", truncation=True, max_length=512)

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)
    probs = torch.softmax(outputs.logits, dim=-1)
    pred = torch.argmax(probs, dim=-1).item()

labels = {0: "negative", 1: "neutral", 2: "positive"}
print(f"Prediction: {labels[pred]} ({probs[0][pred]:.4f})")

Training Data

The model was trained on Kenpache/multilingual-financial-sentiment, a curated dataset of ~39K financial news sentences from 80+ sources across six languages.

Comparison with FinBERT

Citation

If you use this model in your research, please cite:

@misc{finbert-multilingual-2025,
  title={FinBERT-Multilingual: Cross-Lingual Financial Sentiment Analysis with Domain-Adapted XLM-RoBERTa},
  author={Kenpache},
  year={2025},
  url={https://huggingface.co/Kenpache/finbert-multilingual}
}

License

Apache 2.0