AMWAL: Named Entity Recognition for Arabic Financial News

Muhammad S. Abdo, Yash Hatekar, Damir Cavar


Abstract
Financial Named Entity Recognition (NER) presents a pivotal task in extracting structured information from unstructured financial data, especially when extending its application to languages beyond English. In this paper, we present AMWAL, a named entity recognition system for Arabic financial news. Our approach centered on building a specialized corpus compiled from three major Arabic financial newspapers spanning from 2000 to 2023. Entities were extracted from this corpus using a semi-automatic process that included manual annotation and review to ensure accuracy. The total number of entities identified amounts to 17.1k tokens, distributed across 20 categories, providing a comprehensive coverage of financial entities. To standardize the identified entities, we adopt financial concepts from the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO, 2020), aligning our framework with industry standards. The significance of our work lies not only in the creation of the first customized NER system for Arabic financial data but also in its potential to streamline information extraction processes in the financial domain. Our NER system achieves a Precision score of 96.08, a Recall score of 95.87, and an F1 score of 95.97, which outperforms state-of-the-art general Arabic NER systems as well as other systems for financial NER in other languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.finnlp-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop of the 9th Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP), the 6th Financial Narrative Processing (FNP), and the 1st Workshop on Large Language Models for Finance and Legal (LLMFinLegal)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Chung-Chi Chen, Antonio Moreno-Sandoval, Jimin Huang, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Venues:
FinNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
207–213
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.finnlp-1.20/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Muhammad S. Abdo, Yash Hatekar, and Damir Cavar. 2025. AMWAL: Named Entity Recognition for Arabic Financial News. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop of the 9th Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP), the 6th Financial Narrative Processing (FNP), and the 1st Workshop on Large Language Models for Finance and Legal (LLMFinLegal), pages 207–213, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AMWAL: Named Entity Recognition for Arabic Financial News (Abdo et al., FinNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.finnlp-1.20.pdf