Mhlambi, Lwazi Lungile2024-06-182024-06-182023-03Mhlambi, Lwazi Lungile. (2023). A Machine Learning Approach to Corporate Bankruptcy Prediction Using BERT-Based Sentiment Analysis [Master’s dissertation PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]. WireDSpace. https://hdl.handle.net/10539/38684https://hdl.handle.net/10539/38684A research report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Commerce (50% Research) in Finance to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Accountancy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023The study of bankruptcy prediction has centred on whether firm level information is predictive. Seminal work by Altman (1968) articulates the failure of a business utilising its financial variables that are associated and classified in part to either the liquidity, profitability, solvency, leverage, or activity of a corporation. While this understanding is intuitive, recent studies have broadened the scope of financial ratios used in this prediction as well as incorporated exterior forces affecting the firm, either at an enterprise-wide or an economic-wide level to predict corporate bankruptcy. In the same breath, one cannot ignore the insider knowledge that the leaders and managers of firms would have leading to corporate bankruptcy. Therefore, this provides a curious opportunity in which we can incorporate the sentiment in the analysis provided by the leaders of such firms as an input in predicting the bankruptcy of a given firm. This study applies the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) based sentiment analysis approach to import human sentiment as a variable from corporate disclosure data and apply it to existing corporate bankruptcy models over the period between 1995 to 2022 in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States of Americaen© 2023 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.BankruptcyRepresentations from Transformers (BERT)Corporate BankruptcyMachine LearningUCTDSDG-8: Decent work and economic growthDissertationUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg