Proceedings of the Second Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2019)

El-Haj, Mahmoud and Rayson, Paul and Young, Steven and Bouamor, Houda and Ferradans, Sira, eds. (2019) Proceedings of the Second Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2019). Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA. ISBN 9781950737192

Abstract

Welcome to the Second Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2019) held at NoDaLiDa 2019 in Turku, Finland. Following the success of the First FNP 2018 at LREC’18, Japan, we have had a great deal of positive feedback and interest in continuing the development of the financial narrative processing field. This prompted us to hold a training workshop in textual analysis methods for financial narratives that was oversubscribed showing that there is an increasing interest in the subject. As a result, we were motivated to organise the Second Financial Narrative Processing Workshop, FNP 2019. The workshop will focus on the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Corpus Linguistics (CL) methods related to all aspects of financial text mining and financial narrative processing (FNP). There is a growing interest in the application of automatic and computer-aided approaches for extracting, summarising, and analysing both qualitative and quantitative financial data. In recent years, previous manual small-scale research in the Accounting and Finance literature has been scaled up with the aid of NLP and ML methods, for example to examine approaches to retrieving structured content from financial reports, and to study the causes and consequences of corporate disclosure and financial reporting outcomes. One focal point of the proposed workshop is to develop a better understanding of the determinants of financial disclosure quality and the factors that influence the quality of information disclosed to investors beyond the quantitative data reported in the financial statements. The workshop will also encourage efforts to build resources and tools to help advance the work on financial narrative processing (including content retrieval and classification) due to the dearth of publicly available datasets and the high cost and limited access of content providers. The workshop aims to advance research on the lexical properties and narrative aspects of corporate disclosures, including glossy (PDF) annual reports, US 10-K and 10-Q financial documents, corporate press releases (including earning announcements), conference calls, media articles, social media, etc. For FNP 2019 we collaborated with Fortia Financial Solutions, a French based company specialised in Financial Investment and Risk management who will work with us on organising a shared task on automatic detection of financial documents structure as part of FNP 2019. http:// fortia.fr/ We accepted 11 submissions of which are 5 main workshop papers and 6 shared task papers, all papers accepted for oral presentation in the workshop. The papers cover a diverse set of topics in financial narratives processing reporting work on financial reports from different stock markets around the globe presenting analysis of financial reports. The quantity and quality of the contributions to the workshop are strong indicators that there is a continued need for this kind of dedicated Financial Narrative Processing workshop. We would like to acknowledge all the hard work of the submitting authors and thank the reviewers for the valuable feedback they provided. We hope these proceedings will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners in the field of financial narrative processing and NLP in general.