Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an Artificial Intelligence technique that manipulates human text. ChatGPT is the most famous example of NLP, but other NLP techniques existed already before the rise of ChatGPT. From an investment perspective, NLP is a very useful tool to extract information from unstructured textual data, such as news articles, company reports, earnings call transcripts, etc. Both in academic literature and practitioner research, NLP is getting more and more attention.

The topics we have in this area will contribute to these research efforts. Examples of research questions are: Can we distill sentiment from company earnings calls? Can we detect greenwashing from company sustainability reports?

The projects in this area are technical, and strong programming skills are a prerequisite. Prior experience with NLP or Machine Learning is a pre, but not a must. Of course, there are also other important elements to these projects, such as evaluating investment strategies, discussing results with researchers and portfolio managers, writing a research report and giving a presentation. As with all Super Quant internships, the assignment will be supervised by an experienced empirical researcher of Robeco’s Investment Research department. Creative and analytic skills are essential in order to successfully complete the project.

Examples of previous internships:

• Extracting investor sentiment from news articles.

• Detecting greenwashing using NLP.