The 6th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2025)

https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2025/ 

Workshop Description

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 the past 5 years we have proven to be the leaders in Financial NLP, organising more than 7 international events as well as introducing NLP and AI shared tasks and providing datasets and methodologies needed to push forward the emerging field of Financial NLP.

Following the success of the 5th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2023) at the IEEE-BigData Conference in Sorrento, Italy, the 4th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2022) at LREC’22 in Marseille, the 3rd Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2021), the 1st Joint Workshop on Financial Narrative Processing and MultiLing Financial Summarisation (FNP-FNS 2020), as well as the First FNP 2018 at LREC’18 in Japan, the Second FNP 2019 at NoDaLiDa 2019 in Finland and the Multiling 2019 Financial narrative Summarisation task at RANLP in Bulgaria, we have had a great deal of positive feedback and interest in continuing the development of the financial narrative processing field, especially from our shared task participants. Our workshop series are contributing to the field of Financial NLP evident by Google Citations and proceedings on ACL anthology

 

We are also expanding to cover more languages where we introduced two new languages, Spanish and Greek, in addition to the original English and French datasets in the last edition of FNP. In 2022 our workshop was sponsored by the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), as well as  Yseop and Fortia who provided free registration and prizes to the shared task winners.

 

For the 6th FNP shared task, we will continue working in these four languages (English, Spanish and Arabic) and we’ll introduce 2 shared Tasks as follows:

 

1- Financial Causality Detection (FinCausal 2025): detect causal effects in financial disclosures in English and Spanish.

2- Arabic Financial NLP (AraFinNLP 2025): this is the 2nd edition of the shared task where we propose two subtasks aiming at advancing Financial Arabic NLP: Subtask-1, Multi-dialect Intent Detection, and Subtask-2, Cross-dialect Translation and Intent Preservation, in the banking domain. These subtasks are crucial for interpreting and managing the diverse and complex banking data prevalent in Arabic-speaking regions. 

 

The shared tasks attracted more than 150 participants within the last 3 FNP editions, for this year we are expanding the dataset by making the tasks more challenging and by providing 

 

Previous Workshops:

1· The 1st Financial Narrative Processing (FNP 2018) workshop at the 11th Edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018), May 2018 in Miyazaki, Japan. 11 papers with around 20 attendees.

o   http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2018 .  FNP 2018 Full Proceedings.

 

2-3· First and Second Workshops on Textual Analysis Methods in Accounting and Finance at Lancaster University Management School (LUMS), Lancaster University, September 2018 and September 2019 in Lancaster, UK. 40 Attendees each.

o   http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/tamaf2018/ 

o   http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/tamaf2019/ 

 

  1. The 2nd Financial Narrative Processing (FNP 2019) workshops at the 22nd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa’19), Turku, Finland. 11 papers (so far 20 have registered)

o   http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2019 . FNP 2019 Proceedings.

 

  1. The Multiling Summarisation workshops 2011 (TAC, USA), 2013 (ACL, Bulgaria), 2015 (SIGDIAL, Czech), 2017 (ACL, Canada) and 2019 (RANLP, Bulgaria). Including the First Financial Narrative Summarisation Task at Multiling 2019 at RANLP 2019 Varna, Bulgaria. 15-20+ attendees each year.

o   http://multiling.iit.demokritos.gr 

 

6· The 1st Joint Workshop on Financial Narrative Processing and MultiLing Financial Summarisation (FNP-FNS 2020) workshop at The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING’2020), Barcelona, Spain on 12 December 2020. 37 papers, around 30 attendees.

o  http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2020 . FNP 2020 Proceedings.

 

  1. The 3rd Financial Narrative Processing (FNP 2021) workshops as a stand alone event organised by Lancaster University and Yseop, Lancaster, United Kingdom. 22 papers (125 registrations and attendees from 87 cities around the globe – Free Event -)

o   http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2021 . FNP 2021 Proceedings.

 

  1. The 4th Financial Narrative Processing (FNP 2022) held at the 13th Edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2022), Marseille, France, on 24 June 2022. 25 papers (30 in person attendees 20 online)

o   http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2022/ . FNP 2022 Proceedings.

 

  1. The 5th Financial Narrative Processing (FNP 2023) held at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData) 15-18 Dec, Sorrento, Italy. 20 papers (15 in person attendees 5 online)

o   http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2023/ . FNP 2023 Proceedings.

 

Summary of the Call:

We invite papers describing original, completed or ongoing, unpublished research. We welcome paper submissions, in theory, methodology, as well as resources and applications in all areas related to Financial Natural Language Processing and Financial Text Analysis. We also welcome submissions on negative results as well as submissions highlighting challenges faced in industrial or academic settings.

We encourage submissions on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Applying core technologies on financial narratives: morphological analysis, disambiguation, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, chunking, parsing, semantic role labelling, sentiment analysis, document quality and advanced readability metrics, etc.
  • Using NLP to detect misreporting in relation to diversity and wellbeing on issues related to gender, ethnicity, women at work as well as employee mental health and stability.
  • Financial narrative resources: dictionaries, annotated data, tools and technologies etc.
  • Summarisation across domains and sources that are related to finance (e.g. company blogs, product reviews, market briefs, etc.), this includes financial multilingual and cross-lingual summarisation using single-document summarisation, multi-document summarisation, summarisation evaluation, headline generation, cross-domain/cross-topic summarisation.
  • Analysis of Online Social Networks for detection of public opinions towards financial events.
  • Multilingual analysis, describing the different regulatory regimes within which companies operate internationally.
  • Ongoing research and preliminary results
  • Negative results, for example techniques and methodologies that work for certain languages but not on others. Other venues could be showing that state-of-the-art technologies such as BERT could fail on certain tasks or languages.

Provisional Key Dates (for EACL)*:

  • 1st Call for Papers Announcement: 10 July 2024
  • 2nd Call for Papers Announcement: 10 August 2024
  • Paper Submission Deadline: 15 October 2024
  • Notification of Paper Acceptance: 1 November 2024
  • Camera-ready Paper Deadline: 15 November 2024
  • Workshop Date: 21st January 2025

 

* The key dates are based on having EACL as our first choice since Croatia is in the heart of Europe with easy access to researchers and participants from all around the world, especially that our 2 main collaborators are based in Paris. Having said that, we are happy to host FNP at ACL in Canada or EMNLP.

 

Organisers: 

– Mo El-Haj, Lancaster University, UK (General Chair)

– Paul Rayson, Lancaster University, UK (Program Chair)

– Antonio Moreno Sandoval, UAM, Spain (FNP Advisor and FNS / FinTOC Organiser)

– Blanca Carbajo Coronado, UAM, Spain (FNP Coordinator and Publication Chair)

– Doaa Samy, Cairo University and LLI-UAM, Spain (Publicity Chair)

 

Our team is ethnically diverse with the majority of the organisers being identified as females. The team has a great experience in working on Financial NLP and organising in person, online and hybrid events. Our previous events in the past 5 years were organised as part of international NLP conference (LREC, COLING, NODALIDA, RANLP) and as stand alone events, this has also provided us with the skills needed to setting up platforms such as Gather Town and Eval-AI leader-board.

Organising Committee:

 

  • Dr Mo El-Haj (General Chair),  Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University, UK. His main research is on Financial Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction and Text Summarisation. He is the founder and chair organiser of FNP workshop series since 2018, and has organised various NLP workshops and events at conferences such as ACL/EACL/EMNLP/LREC/RANLP/COLING and NODALIDA, m.el-haj@lancaster.ac.uk, http://elhaj.uk/

 

  • Prof Paul Rayson (FNP Program Chair), is the director of the UCREL research centre and a Professor in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University. A long-term focus of his work is the application of semantic-based NLP in extreme circumstances where language is noisy e.g. financial disclosures. Paul has organised many conferences, workshops and events for the past 25 years, this includes 2018-2022 FNP workshops p.rayson@lancaster.ac.uk, https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/scc/about-us/people/paul-rayson

 

  • Dr Antonio Moreno-Sandoval (FNP Program Chair), is a Professor at the General and Computational Linguistic department at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has long experience in organising workshops at top NLP conferences such as ACL/EMNLP/EACL/LREC and his research group is leading the work on Spanish Financial Narrative Processing . antonio.msandoval@uam.es, https://portalcientifico.uam.es/en/ipublic/researcher/260535

 

  • Blanca Carbajo Coronado (FNP Coordinator and Publication Chair) is a PhD student at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid with a scholarship (FPU) awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. Her thesis deals with computational detection of cause-effect relations in financial narratives. She participated in FNP 2022 in the compilation of the Spanish datasets for the FNS and FinTOC tasks. blanca.carbajo@uam.es ,https://portalcientifico.uam.es/en/ipublic/researcher/331702

 

  • Dr Doaa Samy (Publicity Chair, FNS 2023 Shared Task Organiser) is an Associate Researcher at the Computational Linguistics Laboratory, Autónoma University of Madrid (LLI-UAM) and a tenured Associate-Professor of Computational and Applied Linguistics at Cairo University, Egypt. Doaa has long experience in organising workshops on NLP topics related to Language Technologies.  doaasamy@cu.edu.eg,  www.lllf.uam.es/~doaa/ 

 

 Programme Committee (Confirmed, through serving on previous FNP workshops):

  •   Antonio Moreno Sandoval (UAM, Spain)
  •   Vasiliki Athanasakou (SMU, Canada)
  •   Kim Trottier (HEC, Canada)
  •   Doaa Samy (Cairo University, Egypt and LLI-UAM, Spain)
  •   Blanca Carbajo Coronado (UAM, Spain)
  •   Ahmed AbuRa’ed (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain), 
  •   Nikiforos Pittaras (NCSR, Demokritos).
  •   Catherine Salzedo (LUMS, Lancaster University, UK)
  •   Denys Proux (Naver Labs, Switzerland)
  •   George Giannakopoulos (SKEL Lab – NCSR Demokritos, Greece)
  •   Haithem Afli (Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland)
  •   Houda Bouamor (CMU, Qatar)
  •   Mahmoud El-Haj (SCC, Lancaster University, UK)
  •   Marina Litvak (Sami Shamoon College of Engineering, Israel)
  •   Martin Walker (University of Manchester, UK)
  •   Paul Rayson (SCC, Lancaster University, UK)
  •   Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale – ILC, Italy)
  •   Steven Young (LUMS, Lancaster University, UK) 
  •   Scott Piao (SCC, Lancaster University, UK)
  •   Mohan Subbiah (LUMS, Lancaster University, UK)
  •   Paulo Alves (Accounting, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Portugal)
  •   Thomas Schleicher (MBA, Manchester University)
  •   Ana Gisbert (Accounting, UAM, Spain)
  •   Ans Elhag (Lancaster University, UK)
  •   John M. Conroy (IDA Center for Computing Sciences, USA)
  •   Elena Lloret (University of Alicante, Spain)
  •   Vangelis Karkaletsis (NCSR Demokritos)
  •   Mark Last (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
  •   Natalia Vanetik (Sami Shamoon College of Engineering, Israel)   
  •   George Petasis (NCSR Demokritos, Greece)
  •   Peter Rankel (Elder Research Inc., USA)
  •   Juyeon Kang (Fortia Financial Solutions, France)
  •   Ismail  El Maarouf (Imprevicible, France)
  •   Oi Yee Kwong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) 
  •   Stefan Evert (CS, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
  •   Ahmet Aker (CS, Sheffield University, UK)
  •   Horacio Saggion (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)