Harmonizing Macro-Financial Factors and Twitter Sentiment Analysis in Forecasting Stock Market Trends

Abstract

The surge in generative artificial intelligence technologies, exemplified by systems such as ChatGPT, has sparked widespread interest and discourse prominently observed on social media platforms like Twitter. This paper delves into the inquiry of whether sentiment expressed in tweets discussing advancements in AI can forecast day-to-day fluctuations in stock prices of associated companies. Our investigation involves the analysis of tweets containing hashtags related to ChatGPT within the timeframe of December 2022 to March 2023. Leveraging natural language processing techniques, we extract features, including positive/negative sentiment scores, from the collected tweets. A range of classifier machine learning models, encompassing gradient boosting, decision trees and random forests, are employed to train on tweet sentiments and associated features for the prediction of stock price movements among key companies, such as Microsoft and OpenAI. These models undergo training and testing phases utilizing an empirical dataset gathered during the stipulated timeframe. Our preliminary findings reveal intriguing indications suggesting a plausible correlation between public sentiment reflected in Twitter discussions surrounding ChatGPT and generative AI and the subsequent impact on market valuation and trading activities concerning pertinent companies, gauged through stock prices. This study aims to forecast bullish or bearish trends in the stock market by leveraging sentiment analysis derived from an extensive dataset comprising 500,000 tweets. In conjunction with this sentiment analysis derived from Twitter, we incorporate control variables encompassing macroeconomic indicators, Twitter uncertainty index and stock market data for several prominent companies.