The structure and evolution of firms' operations are essential components of modem financial analyses. Traditional text-based approaches have often used standard statistical learning methods to analyze news and other text relating to firm characteristics, which may shroud key semantic information about firm activity. In this paper, we present the Semantically-Informed Financial Index (SIFI), an approach to modeling firm characteristics and dynamics using embeddings from transformer models. As opposed to previous work that uses similar techniques on news sentiment, our methods directly study the business operations that firms report in filings, which are legally required to be accurate. We develop text-based firm classifications that are more informative about fundamentals per level of granularity than established metrics, and use them to study the interactions between firms and industries. We also characterize a basic model of business operation evolution. Our work aims to contribute to the broader study of how text can provide insight into economic behavior.
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