The First Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2018), 7 May 2018
Held at the 11th Edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018), 7-12 May 2018, Miyazaki (Japan).
Workshop Proceedings:
The workshop was streamed on YouTube, see part 1 and 2 below:
Contact Us FNP2018 SoftConf
Important Dates:
Nov 2, 2017: First Call for Workshop Papers
Dec 7, 2017: Second Call for Workshop Papers
Jan 22, 2018 (Midnight PST): Workshop Paper Due Date (** extended **)
Feb 14, 2018: Notification of Acceptance
Mar 2, 2018 (Midnight GMT -12): Camera Ready Papers
Mar 15, 2018 Workshop Schedule
Monday May 7, 2018: Workshop Date (afternoon half-day session 2-6pm).
Workshop Description:
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.
Organising Committee:
General Chairs: Dr Mahmoud El-Haj, and Dr Paul Rayson (SCC, Lancaster University, UK)
Program Chair: Prof Steven 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)
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.
Identify, Describe and Share Your LRs:
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research.
Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones)
Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.
As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2018 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.
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/authors-kit/
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_Conference_Conflict-of-interest_policy
Submission Website: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2018/FNP2018/
Workshop Schedule (The workshop is a half-day event):
The workshop will be on the afternoon session of Monday, 7 May 2018.
The workshop will be from 2pm to 6pm. Below is a provisional schedule:
| 14:00-14:10 | Opening Remarks |
| 14:10-16:00 | Session 1 |
| 16:00-16:30 | Coffee Break |
| 16:30-18:00 | Session 2 |
Session 1:
| 14.00 – 14.10 | Opening Remarks by Workshop Chair (Dr Mahmoud El-Haj) |
| 14.10 – 14.30 | The Ontology-Based Banking Chatbot |
| 14.30 – 14.50 | Analysis and Annotation of English-Chinese Financial Terms for Benchmarking and Language Processing |
| 14.50 – 15.10 | BORSAH: An Arabic Sentiment Financial Tweets Corpus |
| 15.10 – 15.30 | Diachronic Lexical Changes in Company Reports |
| 15.30 – 15.50 | Mapping Corporate Filings to Knowledge Graphs using Deep NLP |
| 16.00 – 16.30 | Coffee Break |
Session 2:
| 16.30 – 16.50 | NSTUSD-Fin: A Market Sentiment Dictionary for Financial Social Media Data Applications |
| 16.50 – 17.10 | QSRL: A Semantic Role-Labelling Schema for Quantitative Facts |
| 17.10 – 17.30 | Multilingual Financial Narrative Processing |
| 17.30 – 17.50 | Trust and Doubt Terms in Financial Communication |
| 17.50 – 18.00 | Closing Remarks by Workshop Chair (Dr Paul Rayson) |
The workshop will be at the Phoenix Seagaia Resort.
Programme Committee:
- Andrew Moore (SCC, Lancaster University)
- Antonio Moreno Sandoval (UAM)
- Catherine Salzedo (LUMS, Lancaster University)
- Denys Proux (Naver Labs)
- George Giannakopoulos (SKEL Lab – NCSR Demokritos)
- Mahmoud El-Haj (SCC, Lancaster University)
- Marina Litvak (Sami Shamoon College of Engineering)
- Martin Walker (University of Manchester)
- Paul Rayson (SCC, Lancaster University)
- Scott Piao (SCC, Lancaster University)
- Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale – ILC)
- Stefan Evert (CS, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
- Steven Young (LUMS, Lancaster University)
- Vasiliki Athanasakou (LSE)
List of Accepted Papers:
| Title | Authors |
| NTUSD-Fin : A Market Sentiment Dictionary for Financial Social Media Data Applications | Chung-Chi Chen, Hen-Hsen Huang and Hsin-Hsi Chen |
| Towards a Multilingual Financial Narrative Processing System | Mahmoud El-Haj, Paul Rayson, Paulo Alves and Steven Young |
| An Ontology-Based Dialogue Management System for Banking and Finance Dialogue Systems | Duygu Altinok |
| Analysis and Annotation of English-Chinese Financial Terms for Benchmarking and Language Processing | Oi Yee Kwong |
| Trust and Doubt Terms in Financial Tweets and Periodic Reports | Martin Žnidaršič, Jasmina Smailović, Jan Gorše, Miha Grčar, Igor Mozetič and Senja Pollak |
| Mapping Deep NLP to Knowledge Graphs: An Enhanced Approach to Analyzing Corporate Filings with Regulators | Damir Cavar and Matthew Josefy |
| Diachronic Lexical Changes In Company Reports: An Initial Investigation | Matthew Purver, Aljoša Valentinčič, Marko Pahor and Senja Pollak |
| QSRL: A semantic role-labeling schema for quantitative facts | Matthew Lamm, Arun Chaganty, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher D. Manning and Percy Liang |
| BORSAH: An Arabic Sentiment Financial Tweets Corpus | Mohammed Alshahrani, Fuxi Zhu, Mohammed Alghaili, Eshrag Refaee And Mervat Bamiah |