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From text annotation to an auto-regressive language model for sentiment analysis in South African financial reviews

Dissertation (MSc (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2024.

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Other Authors: Marivate, Vukosi
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: University of Pretoria 2025
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access_status_str Open Access
author2 Marivate, Vukosi
author_browse Marivate, Vukosi
author_facet Marivate, Vukosi
collection Thesis
dc_rights_str_mv © 2023 University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria.
description Dissertation (MSc (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2024.
format Thesis
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institution University of Pretoria (South Africa)
language English
last_indexed 2026-06-10T12:38:50.869Z
license_str Other — see source repository
provenance_str_mv Harvested via OAI-PMH from UPSpace — University of Pretoria Institutional Repository
publishDate 2025
publishDateRange 2025
publishDateSort 2025
publisher University of Pretoria
publisherStr University of Pretoria
record_format dspace
source_str UPSpace — University of Pretoria Institutional Repository
spelling oai:repository.up.ac.za:2263/101248 From text annotation to an auto-regressive language model for sentiment analysis in South African financial reviews Marivate, Vukosi miehleketo.mathebula@tuks.co.za Modupe, Abiodun Mathebula, Miehleketo UCTD Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Large language models Sentiment analysis Retrieval-augmented generation Prompt engineering Conversational fine-tuning Retrieval augmented generation assessment Auto-regressive LLM Dissertation (MSc (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2024. In contemporary society, social media enables rapid expression of public sentiment toward governmental policies and financial products. This immediacy and depth of sharing can serve as a virtual focus group for major financial decisions, offering a gold mine for understanding customer satisfaction and identifying new product features and services. Customer reviews are crucial for the profits and reputations of financial institutions. SA assesses customer feedback and media headlines to gauge sentiment but faces challenges with the brevity, abbreviations, and financial terminologies in social media content. Earlier studies used human-annotated text to create LBMs for training MLAs in SA. However, these models lacked robustness and failed to capture the full range of natural language semantics. Our research used advanced natural language processing to address this gap, gathering customer reviews from Hellopeter and financial data from the top five JSE-listed financial institutions in South Africa. We employed OpenAI's ChatGPT as a zero-shot learning model to produce human-like annotations for sentiment tasks. The feature vector from ChatGPT was input into BERT, BiLSTM, and a SoftMax function to measure and categorize sentiment. Oversampling methods addressed data imbalance, and visualization techniques were applied to review text and polarity. Our method performed as well as or better than recent cutting-edge methods, achieving an average score of 98.9%, an F1-measure of 97.7%, and an AUC of 91.90% with oversampling. Traditional LBMs, SVMs, and logistic regression achieved 86.68% accuracy and an AUC of 91.90%. The study demonstrates ChatGPT’s competence in annotating customer reviews with emotional tone or polarity, highlighting the benefits of integrating customer SA with financial analysis to prioritize customer preferences. To overcome LBMs' limitations and pre-defined sentiment lexicons, we developed LFEAR, which combines the RAG model with a conversational format for an ARFT. Fine-tuned on HelloPeter reviews, LFEAR demonstrated resilience and flexibility in analyzing sentiments across various domains. It achieved an average answer precision score of 98.45%, correctness of 93.85%, and context precision of 97.69% according to RAGAS metrics. The LFEAR model effectively conducted SA over multiple domains, demonstrating adaptability, proper sentiment annotation, and bias-free analysis. This approach is particularly beneficial for social media posts by financial sector stakeholders, including investors and institutions whose posts impact JSE-listed entities. Computer Science Msc (Computer Science) Unrestricted Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology None 2025-02-27T10:48:01Z 2025-02-27T10:48:01Z 2025-05 2024-11 Dissertation * A2025 http://hdl.handle.net/2263/101248 https://doi.org/10.25403/UPresearchdata.28504796 en © 2023 University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria. application/pdf University of Pretoria
spellingShingle UCTD
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Large language models
Sentiment analysis
Retrieval-augmented generation
Prompt engineering
Conversational fine-tuning
Retrieval augmented generation assessment
Auto-regressive LLM
From text annotation to an auto-regressive language model for sentiment analysis in South African financial reviews
title From text annotation to an auto-regressive language model for sentiment analysis in South African financial reviews
title_full From text annotation to an auto-regressive language model for sentiment analysis in South African financial reviews
title_fullStr From text annotation to an auto-regressive language model for sentiment analysis in South African financial reviews
title_full_unstemmed From text annotation to an auto-regressive language model for sentiment analysis in South African financial reviews
title_short From text annotation to an auto-regressive language model for sentiment analysis in South African financial reviews
title_sort from text annotation to an auto regressive language model for sentiment analysis in south african financial reviews
topic UCTD
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Large language models
Sentiment analysis
Retrieval-augmented generation
Prompt engineering
Conversational fine-tuning
Retrieval augmented generation assessment
Auto-regressive LLM
url http://hdl.handle.net/2263/101248
https://doi.org/10.25403/UPresearchdata.28504796