Abstract/Summary

Large language models (LLMs) have drastically changed the possible ways to design intelligent systems, shifting the focus from massive data acquisition and new model training to human alignment and strategic elicitation of the full potential of existing pre-trained models. This paradigm shift, however, is not fully realized in financial sentiment analysis (FSA) due to the discriminative nature of this task and a lack of prescriptive knowledge of how to leverage existing generative models in such a context. This study investigates the effectiveness of the new paradigm, that is, using LLMs without fine-tuning for FSA. Rooted in Minsky’s theory of mind and emotions, a design framework with heterogeneous LLM agents is proposed and applied to FSA. The framework instantiates specialized agents using prior guiding knowledge from both linguistics and finance. Then, a summative agent reasons on the aggregated agent discussions. Comprehensive evaluations using six FSA datasets show that the framework yields better accuracies compared to many alternative multi-LLM agent settings, especially when the discussion contents are substantial. This study contributes to the design foundations and paves new avenues for LLMs-based FSA and potentially other tasks. Implications for business and management have also been discussed.