In the dynamic landscape of financial analytics, the argumentation within Earnings Conference Calls (ECCs) provides valuable insights for investors and market participants. This paper delves into the automatic relation identification between argument components in this type of data, a poorly studied task in the literature. To tackle this challenge, we empirically examined and analysed a wide range of open-source models, as well as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer GPT-4. On the one hand, our experiments in open-source models spanned general-purpose models, debate-fine-tuned models, and financial-fine-tuned models. On the other hand, we assessed the performance of GPT-4 zero-shot learning on a financial argumentation dataset (FinArg). Our findings show that a smaller open-source model, fine-tuned on relevant data, can perform as a huger general-purpose one, showing the value of enriching the local embeddings with the semantic context of data. However, GPT-4 demonstrated superior performance with F1-score of 0.81, even with no given samples or shots. In this paper, we detail our data, models and experimental setup. We also provide further performance analysis from different aspects.

Communicating through social platforms has become one of the principal means of personal communications and interactions. Unfortunately, healthy communication is often interfered by offensive language that can have damaging effects on the users. A key to fight offensive language on social media is the existence of an automatic offensive language detection system. This paper presents the results and the main findings of SemEval-2020, Task 12 OffensEval Sub-task A Zampieri et al. (2020), on Identifying and categorising Offensive Language in Social Media. The task was based on the Arabic OffensEval dataset Mubarak et al. (2020). In this paper, we describe the system submitted by WideBot AI Lab for the shared task which ranked 10th out of 52 participants with Macro-F1 86.9% on the golden dataset under CodaLab username “yasserotiefy”. We experimented with various models and the best model is a linear SVM in which we use a combination of both character and word n-grams. We also introduced a neural network approach that enhanced the predictive ability of our system that includes CNN, highway network, Bi-LSTM, and attention layers.