BANA 5210 - Natural Language Processing in Finance

Summer. 1.5 credits. Letter grades only (no audit).

C. Meredith.

This course will teach how to use natural language as an input to machine learning algorithms with the goal of modeling topics across businesses and the public equity landscape. Students will gain a comprehensive understanding of ML by seeing its applicability in investing. They will learn foundational aspects of natural language processing, how it fits into the field of analytics, and ways that NLP is used to manage an investment portfolio. Professor Meredith will teach practical techniques students can use for working with text, but will also teach them skills that go beyond just text processing, such as data manipulation using Pandas, using SQL to ingest data into a Python framework, and working with common ML algorithms and how to tune their hyperparameters. Students will walk away with analytical techniques for evaluating models and the core skill of exercising human judgment in evaluating model performance. Ultimately, students will apply all of these concepts by setting up a successful machine learning project on their own.