Detecting Document Structure in a Very Large Corpus of UK Financial Reports

Mahmoud El-Haj, Paul Rayson, Steve Young, Martin Walker


Abstract
In this paper we present the evaluation of our automatic methods for detecting and extracting document structure in annual financial reports. The work presented is part of the Corporate Financial Information Environment (CFIE) project in which we are using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to study the causes and consequences of corporate disclosure and financial reporting outcomes. We aim to uncover the determinants of financial reporting quality and the factors that influence the quality of information disclosed to investors beyond the financial statements. The CFIE consists of the supply of information by firms to investors, and the mediating influences of information intermediaries on the timing, relevance and reliability of information available to investors. It is important to compare and contrast specific elements or sections of each annual financial report across our entire corpus rather than working at the full document level. We show that the values of some metrics e.g. readability will vary across sections, thus improving on previous research research based on full texts.
Anthology ID:
L14-1348
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1335–1338
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/402_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mahmoud El-Haj, Paul Rayson, Steve Young, and Martin Walker. 2014. Detecting Document Structure in a Very Large Corpus of UK Financial Reports. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 1335–1338, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Document Structure in a Very Large Corpus of UK Financial Reports (El-Haj et al., LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/402_Paper.pdf