Industry-sensitive language modeling for business

Abstract

We introduce BusinessBERT, a new industry-sensitive language model for business applications. The key novelty of our model lies in incorporating industry information to enhance decision-making in business-related natural language processing (NLP) tasks. BusinessBERT extends the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) architecture by embedding industry information during pretraining through two innovative approaches that enable BusinessBert to capture industry-specific terminology: (1) BusinessBERT is trained on business communication corpora totaling 2.23 billion tokens consisting of company website content, MD&A statements and scientific papers in the business domain; (2) we employ industry classification as an additional pretraining objective. Our results suggest that BusinessBERT improves data-driven decision-making by providing superior performance on business-related NLP tasks. Our experiments cover 7 benchmark datasets that include text classification, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and question-answering tasks. Additionally, this paper reduces the complexity of using BusinessBERT for other NLP applications by making it freely available as a pretrained language model to the business community. The model, its pretraining corpora and corresponding code snippets are accessible via https://github.com/pnborchert/BusinessBERT.