Sentiment of financial news, in seven languages, from one model. Feed it a headline
or a sentence in English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French or Arabic — get
back negative, neutral or positive.
python
1from transformers import pipeline
23clf = pipeline("text-classification", model="Kenpache/finbert-multilingual-v2")45clf("The company reported record quarterly earnings, driven by strong demand.")6# [{'label': 'positive', 'score': 0.9456}]78clf("Die Aktie verlor nach der Gewinnwarnung deutlich an Wert.")9# [{'label': 'negative', 'score': 0.9324}]1011clf("该公司宣布大规模裁员计划,股价应声下跌。")12# [{'label': 'negative', 'score': 0.9406}]
One model covers all seven languages — no per-language checkpoints, no translation step,
no language ID in front of it. Mixed-language pipelines just work.
Larger sibling:Kenpache/finbert-multilingual-v2-large
— 560M parameters, 88.9% on the same evaluation set. Take that one for accuracy, this
one for footprint.
This is the table to read before adopting the model — it tells you whether your
language is covered properly, not just the average.
Language
Items
Accuracy
Spanish
es
905
0.8950
Chinese
zh
1,023
0.8935
German
de
650
0.8785
Arabic
ar
73
0.8767
Japanese
ja
1,063
0.8702
English
en
780
0.8410
French
fr
499
0.8337
The spread between the best and worst language is 6 points, and English is not at the
top — Spanish and Chinese are. That matters more than it looks: most "multilingual"
financial models are English models with a multilingual tokenizer, and they collapse on
CJK and right-to-left text. This one holds its level across scripts — Latin, Chinese,
Japanese and Arabic alike.
Arabic is measured on 73 items, so treat its number as indicative rather than precise.
Reproducing these numbers
The evaluation set is public, and so is the protocol — max_length=192, fp32, raw text
with no normalisation:
No class collapse: the three F1 scores sit within 1.6 points of each other, and neutral
— the majority class, and the usual dumping ground for models that learned to hedge — has
the lowest F1 of the three rather than the highest.
Polarity errors are rare. Across all 4,993 items, negative is called positive 19
times and positive is called negative 32 times — 51 cases, 1.0% of the set.
Practically all remaining error sits on the boundary with neutral. The model may fail to
register a weak signal; it very seldom reverses one.
Comparison on the English subset
Both models were run on the English portion — 780 items — of
Kenpache/financial-sentiment-eval-7lang,
under one identical protocol: max_length=192, fp32, raw text, argmax over the three
classes, no tuning or threshold fitting for either model.
Two things belong next to those numbers. ProsusAI/finbert is an English-only model, so
the comparison is confined to the English subset — which is, as the table above shows,
this model's weakest language of the seven. And it was trained under a different
annotation convention: most of its errors on this set are neutral items assigned a
direction, so part of the gap reflects differing label conventions rather than capability.
These figures describe behaviour on this evaluation set only, under the protocol stated
above. They are not a general claim about either model.
Cross-benchmark check: Financial PhraseBank
A model tends to look good on the benchmark its own authors picked, so here is the mirror
image of the table above — the same two models on
Financial PhraseBank
(Malo et al., 2014), the long-standing English benchmark in this field, all 4,846
sentences, under the identical protocol.
Read that gap with one fact next to it: ProsusAI/finbert was fine-tuned on Financial
PhraseBank — its model card states that "Financial PhraseBank by Malo et al. (2014) is
used for fine-tuning". This model has never seen the corpus. All 4,846 sentences were
checked against this model's training, validation and test data after normalising case
and punctuation; the overlap is zero.
So neither benchmark is neutral ground. The first favours this model, the second favours
ProsusAI/finbert. Together they bracket the answer:
This model gives up a little over a point when moved onto a foreign benchmark. The
English-only model moves by nearly seventeen between the two.
Polarity holds. On its own evaluation set this model reverses polarity on 1.0% of
items; on Financial PhraseBank — a corpus a decade older, in a different register, under a
different annotation convention — the rate is 1.1% (53 of 4,846). The core judgement
of direction does not degrade off home ground.
94% of the remaining error sits on the boundary with neutral, which is where the two
conventions genuinely disagree rather than where the model fails. Financial PhraseBank
labels a signed contract or a reported sales increase as positive; this model treats a
bare corporate fact as neutral unless the text carries an evaluative charge. Neither
reading is wrong — they are two conventions, and each model follows the one it was built
for.
These figures describe behaviour on these two evaluation sets only. They are not a
general claim about either model.
Usage
pip install transformers torch
Pipeline
python
1from transformers import pipeline
23clf = pipeline("text-classification", model="Kenpache/finbert-multilingual-v2")45clf("Les bénéfices du groupe ont augmenté de 15% au premier trimestre.")6# [{'label': 'positive', 'score': 0.9423}]
Batch a whole list in one call:
python
1texts =["株価は決算発表後に急落した。",2"La compañía anunció un despido masivo y sus acciones se desplomaron.",3"Quarterly revenue beat analyst expectations by a wide margin."]45clf(texts, batch_size=32)6# [{'label': 'negative', 'score': 0.9275},7# {'label': 'negative', 'score': 0.9355},8# {'label': 'positive', 'score': 0.9391}]
Add top_k=None to get the full probability distribution over all three classes instead
of the winner only — useful when you want to threshold on confidence rather than take
the argmax.
Direct loading
python
1import torch
2from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification, AutoTokenizer
34REPO ="Kenpache/finbert-multilingual-v2"5tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(REPO)6model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(REPO).eval()78text ="Der Umsatz blieb im Vergleich zum Vorjahr unverändert."9enc = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt", truncation=True, max_length=192)1011with torch.no_grad():12 probs = torch.softmax(model(**enc).logits, dim=-1)[0]1314for i, p inenumerate(probs):15print(f"{model.config.id2label[i]:8}{p:.4f}")1617# negative 0.039118# neutral 0.908719# positive 0.0522
CUDA, Apple Silicon and plain CPU all work — at 307M parameters this is a small model by
current standards, and it runs comfortably on a laptop.
Use max_length=192 to reproduce the numbers above. The backbone supports up to
8,192 tokens, so longer inputs are technically fine, but the reported accuracy is
measured at 192 — enough for headlines and single sentences, which is what this model is
for.
Limitations
Sentence-level, not document-level. The model is built for headlines and single
sentences. Feeding a full article gives you one label for the whole thing, which is
rarely what you want — split it first.
Financial sentiment is not general sentiment. "Shares fell 3% on the news" is
negative in a market sense with no emotional language at all. On product reviews or
social media this model is the wrong tool.
neutral is a convention, not a fact. The boundary between neutral and mildly
positive/negative is where human annotators disagree most, and the model inherits that
ambiguity. If a decision hinges on that boundary, use the probabilities and a
threshold instead of the argmax.
Arabic coverage is thin in evaluation (73 items). The other six languages are
measured on 499–1,063 items each.
Seven languages, not 1,811. The backbone is pretrained on far more, but this
classifier was tuned for these seven. Other languages will produce output, but it is
untested.
Not investment advice. The output is a sentiment label on a text, not a signal to
trade on.
Intended use
Good fits:
tagging multilingual financial news feeds in real time
market-sentiment dashboards and indices across regions
pre-screening research corpora before human analysis
backtesting sentiment-based features on multilingual sources
Poor fits: general-purpose sentiment, long documents, languages outside the seven,
anything where the neutral boundary carries legal or financial weight on its own.
Files
File
What it is
model.safetensors
weights, fp32, 1.2 GB
config.json
ModernBERT config with id2label (negative / neutral / positive)
tokenizer.json, tokenizer_config.json
tokenizer
License
Apache 2.0.
Built on jhu-clsp/mmBERT-base, which is
MIT-licensed; that attribution is preserved here.