FNP 2018 - First Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2018)

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 da ta 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.
Motivation and topics of interest:
Financial narrative disclosures represent a large part of firms’ overall financial communications with investors. Textual commentaries help to clarify issues obscured by complex accounting methods and footnote disclosures. In addition, narratives summarise corporate strategy, contextualize results, explain governance arrangements, describe corporate social responsibility policy, and provide forward-looking information for investors. They also provide management with an opportunity to obfuscate accounting results and manipulate readers’ perceptions of underlying economic performance.
Call For Papers
We invite submissions on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:
Applying core technologies on financial narratives: morphological analysis, disambiguation, tokenization, POS tagging, named entity detection, chunking, parsing, semantic role labelling, sentiment analysis, document quality and advanced readability metrics etc.
Financial narratives resources: dictionaries, annotated data, tools and technologies etc.
Given the international nature of LREC, we particularly welcome FNP papers reporting non-English and multilingual research, describing the different regulatory regimes within which companies operate internationally.
Submissions may include work in progress as well as finished work. Submissions must have a clear focus on specific issues pertaining to the financial narrative processing whether it is English or multilingual. Descriptions of commercial systems are welcome but authors should be willing to discuss the details of their work. Dual submissions should be disclosed at time of submission.
Paper Submission Instructions:
Paper Length: Submissions are expected to be between a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 8 pages in length.
Submission Format: Please check LREC author’s kit page for more details. Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. http://lrec2018.lrec-conf.org/en/submission/author...
Conflict of Interest Guidelines: We are following the ACL conflict of interest guidelines, please see the following link for more details: https://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_C...
Submission Website: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2018/FNP2018/
Organising Committee:
General Chairs: Dr Mahmoud El-Haj, and Dr Paul Rayson (SCC, Lancaster University, UK)
Program Chair: Prof Steve Young (LUMS, Lancaster University, UK)
Publication Chair: Andrew Moore (SCC, Lancaster University, UK)
Publicity Chairs: Prof Stefan Evert (CS, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany), and Dr Catherine Salzedo (LUMS, Lancaster University, UK)
Programme Committee:
Ahmet Aker (Sheffield University, UK)
André Freitas (University of Passau, Germany)
Andrew Moore (SCC, Lancaster University)
Antonio Mereno Sandoval (UAM, Spain)
Catherine Salzedo (LUMS, Lancaster University)
Denys PROUX (Naver Labs)
George Giannakopoulos (SKEL Lab – NCSR Demokritos, Greece)
Jan Hajič (UFAL, Czech Republic)
Mahmoud El-Haj (SCC, Lancaster University)
Marina Litvak (Sami Shamoon College of Engineering)
Martin Walker (University of Manchester, UK)
Matthew Coole (SCC, Lancaster University)
Paul Rayson (SCC, Lancaster University)
Scott Piao (SCC, Lancaster University)
Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale – ILC, Italy)
Stefan Evert (CS, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
Steve Young (LUMS, Lancaster University)
Vasiliki Athanasakou (LSE, UK)