During a scientific seminar held at Yerevan State University, Professor Ruben Gevorgyan from the Faculty of Economics and Management and Associate Professor Davit Hayrapetyan from the Faculty of Philosophy and Psychology presented their co-authored research titled "From Headlines to Forecasts: Narrative Econometrics in Equity Markets", published in the prominent Journal of Risk and Financial Management.
This interdisciplinary study investigates how specific narratives derived from news can enhance traditional models for forecasting stock returns. The authors employed modern artificial intelligence techniques, including BERTopic and BERT embeddings, to analyze Microsoft's news flow and identify three primary narrative clusters: media and public perception, currency and macroeconomic environment, and the technology and semiconductor ecosystem.
The results demonstrated that narratives within the news domain have a significant impact on a company's stock returns. In particular, themes related to media coverage and public perception can signal market shifts and predict fluctuations in returns.
During the seminar, the researchers presented their novel methodological approach, which combines time series analysis with natural language processing, establishing a new intersection between financial data science and behavioral economics.
The study highlights that financial market analysis can incorporate social and communicative factors to produce more accurate forecasts. According to the authors, the proposed approach is scalable and can be applied to different companies and sectors, provided that sufficient news data is available.
The findings represent an important contribution to the fields of data-driven financial analysis and artificial intelligence applications, demonstrating that economic processes can often be understood not only through numbers but also through narratives.
The seminar was attended by academic staff members and postgraduate students of the faculty. It is noteworthy that the YSU Faculty of Economics and Management has launched a series of scientific seminars open to academic staff, students, and postgraduate students from both YSU and other universities in Armenia.
