FinTOC-2021 Shared Task: “Financial Document Structure Extraction”

To be held at The 3rd Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2021), Lancaster, United Kingdom [online] on 15 September 2021.

NEW: Participation form: https://forms.gle/qawe1dP13MAsTdLu6

Important Dates:

  • 1st Call for participation: 1 May 2021
  • 2nd Call for participation: 1 June 2021
  • Training set release: 1 June 2021
  • End of training phase: 14 August 2021
  • Blind test set release: 23 August 2021 (extended)
  • Systems submission deadline: 30 August 2021
  • Release of results: 30 August 2021
  • Short papers submission deadline: 10 September 2021
  • Workshop day: 15-16 September 2021

 

Awards and Prizes:

The winning team for FinTOC 2021 shared task will receive an achievement certificate and a money prize worth US$650. The team will also be given the chance to present their work at the workshop.

Introduction:

A vast amount of financial documents are created and published constantly in machine-readable formats (generally PDF file format), with only minimal structure information. Firms use such documents to report their activities, financial situation or potential investment plans to shareholders, investors and the financial markets, basically corporate annual reports containing detailed financial and operational information.

In some countries as in the US or in France, regulators as EDGAR SEC or AMF require firms to follow a certain template when reporting their financial results to insure standardisation and consistency across firms’ disclosures. In other European countries, on the other hand, the management usually have more discretion on what where and how to report resulting in lack of standardisation between financial documents published within the same market.

In this shared task, we focus on analysing Financial Prospectuses; official PDF documents in which investment funds precisely describe their characteristics and investment modalities. Although the content they must include is often regulated, their format is not standardized and displays a great deal of variability ranging from plain text format, towards more graphical and tabular presentation of data and information. The majority of prospectuses are published without a table of content (TOC), which is usually needed to help readers to navigate within the document by following a simple outline of headers and page numbers, and assist legal teams in checking if all the contents required are fully included. Thus, automatic analyses of prospectuses to extract their structure is becoming more and more vital to many firms across the world.

Task:

The third edition of the FinTOC shared task proposes the same two tracks as the FinTOC’2 edition: one track for english documents and another for french documents, and it will score systems on both Title detection and TOC generation performance. We have revised the task and greatly simplified data formats to make it as smooth as possible for every interested researcher to participate and submit their systems’ outputs at FinTOC’3.

Participants need to register. Once registered, all participating teams will be provided with a common training dataset containing PDF documents and the associated TOC annotation.

Background:

Existing work on book and document table of contents (TOC) recognition has been almost all on small size, application-dependent, and domain-specific datasets. However, TOC of documents from different domains differ significantly in their visual layout and style, making TOC recognition a challenging problem for a large scale collection of heterogeneous documents and books. Compared to regular books (mostly provided in a full text format with limited structural information such as pages and paragraphs), Financial documents, containing textual and non textual content, have a more sophisticated structure including, parts, sections, sub-sections, sub-sub-sections. 

How to participate:

To participate please use the registration form below to add details of your team: https://forms.gle/qawe1dP13MAsTdLu6 (this is now open as of 19/04/2021)

Data Format and Evaluation:

TBA

Shared task Paper Submission Instructions:

TBA

Shared Task Organisers:

Shared Task Contact:

Questions about FinTOC-2021 shared task can be sent to:

fin.toc.task@gmail.com