Nowcasting Corporate Product Development Activities Through News Article by BERTopic: The Case of the Japanese Chemical Company

In this study, we attempt to extract corporate trends from news data. Specifically, in this analysis, we employed BERTopic to group news containing various topics into several categories. BERTopic is a tool for document clustering that utilizes BERT. The analysis focused on examining the relevance between topics related to products and corporate activities. The study targeted news headlines of specific chemical company listed on the Japanese stock market, covering a sample period of 24 years from 1996 to 2019. The results of the analysis revealed (1) the ability of BERTopic to classify target news into multiple groups and (2) the potential to efficiently obtain information about future corporate activities from the content of the news. These findings indicate the possibility of acquiring timely information about corporate trends through the analysis of news headlines using BERTopic.