LLM-Based Financial Sentiment Analysis in Arabic: Evidence from Saudi Markets

Mona H. Albaqawi, Eman M. Albalkhi, Joud A. Albaiti, Enrico Lopedoto


Abstract
Investor sentiment significantly influences financial markets, yet Arabic financial sentiment analysis remains limited by linguistic complexity and scarce domain-specific resources. This paper presents an LLM-based framework for large-scale Arabic financial sentiment analysis tailored to the Saudi market. We construct an 84K-sample Arabic Financial Sentiment Corpus integrating official financial news and social media data. The proposed pipeline includes preprocessing, deduplication, entity linking, conditional summarization, and five-class sentiment labeling using a multi-model consensus strategy to enhance reliability. We benchmark multiple large language models against traditional lexicon-based and fine-tuned transformer baselines. GPT-5 achieves the strongest class-balanced performance (Macro-F1 = 0.829), substantially outperforming conventional approaches. For summarization, Allam demonstrates the best trade-off between quality, hallucination control, and cost efficiency. Additional analyses examine cost–quality trade-offs and the impact of summarization on sentiment consistency. The results establish new benchmarks for Arabic financial sentiment classification and demonstrate the effectiveness of scalable LLM-based pipelines for domain-specific Arabic NLP.
Anthology ID:
2026.osact-1.2
Volume:
The 7th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT7) with 5 Shared Tasks
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Hend Al-Khalifa, Mo El-Haj, Saad Ezzini
Venues:
OSACT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14–24
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-osact-02
DOI:
10.63317/3hsd9iyq472z
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mona H. Albaqawi, Eman M. Albalkhi, Joud A. Albaiti, and Enrico Lopedoto. 2026. LLM-Based Financial Sentiment Analysis in Arabic: Evidence from Saudi Markets. In The 7th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT7) with 5 Shared Tasks, pages 14–24, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLM-Based Financial Sentiment Analysis in Arabic: Evidence from Saudi Markets (Albaqawi et al., OSACT 2026)
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