Corporate Bankruptcy Prediction with Domain-Adapted BERT
Alex Kim Sangwon Yoon
This study performs BERT-based analysis, which is a representative
contextualized language model, on corporate disclosure data to predict
impending bankruptcies. Prior literature on bankruptcy prediction mainly
focuses on developing more sophisticated prediction methodologies with
financial variables. However, in our study, we focus on improving the quality
of input dataset. Specifically, we employ BERT model to perform sentiment
analysis on MD&A disclosures. We show that BERT outperforms dictionary-based
predictions and Word2Vec-based predictions in terms of adjusted R-square in
logistic regression, k-nearest neighbor (kNN-5), and linear kernel support
vector machine (SVM). Further, instead of pre-training the BERT model from
scratch, we apply self-learning with confidence-based filtering to corporate
disclosure data (10-K). We achieve the accuracy rate of 91.56% and demonstrate
that the domain adaptation procedure brings a significant improvement in
prediction accuracy.