The Second Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2019)


To be held at The 22nd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa’19) in Turku, Finland.
Workshop URL: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2019/
Shared Task URL: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/shared-task/


WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:

Following the success of the First FNP 2018 at LREC’18, Japan, we have had a great deal of positive feedback and interest in continuing the development of the financial narrative processing field. This prompted us to hold a training workshop in textual analysis methods for financial narratives that was oversubscribed showing that there is an increasing interest in the subject. As a result, we are now motivated to organise the Second Financial Narrative Processing Workshop, FNP 2019.

The workshop will continue focusing on the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Corpus Linguistics (CL) methods related to all aspects of financial text mining and financial narrative processing (FNP). 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 example to examine approaches to retrieving structured content from financial reports, and to study the causes and consequences of corporate disclosure and financial reporting outcomes. One focal point of the workshop is to develop a better understanding of the determinants of financial disclosure quality and the factors that influence the quality of information disclosed to investors beyond the quantitative data reported in the financial statements. The workshop will also encourage efforts to build resources and tools to help advance the work on financial narrative processing (including content retrieval and classification) due to the dearth of publicly available datasets and the high cost and limited access of content providers. The workshop aims to advance research on the lexical properties and narrative aspects of corporate disclosures, including glossy (PDF) annual reports, US 10-K and 10-Q financial documents, corporate press releases (including earning announcements), conference calls, media articles, social media, etc.

For FNP 2019 we are collaborating with Fortia Financial Solutions, a French based company specialised in Financial Investment and Risk management on organising a shared task on automatic detection of financial documents structure as part of FNP 2019. http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/shared-task/
Systems participating in the shared task can be submitted as short papers to be part of the workshop's proceedings.



MOTIVATION AND TOPICS OF INTEREST:

Financial narrative disclosures represent a large part of firms overall financial communications with investors. Textual commentaries help to clarify issues obscured by complex accounting methods and footnote disclosures. In addition, narratives summarise corporate strategy, contextualise results, explain governance arrangements, describe corporate social responsibility policy, and provide forward-looking information for investors. They also provide management with an opportunity to obfuscate accounting results and manipulate readers’ perceptions of underlying economic performance.


ORGANISING COMMITTEE:

- General Chair: Dr Mahmoud El-Haj (SCC, Lancaster University, UK)
- Program Chairs: Dr Paul Rayson (SCC, Lancaster University, UK) and Prof Steven Young (LUMS, Lancaster University, UK)
- Publication Chair: Dr Houda Bouamor (Fortia Financial Solution, France)
- Publicity Chairs: Dr Sira Ferradans (Fortia Financial Solution, France), and Dr Cathrine Salzedo (LUMS, Lancaster University, UK)


SHARED-TASK ORGANISING COMMITTEE:

- Dr Sira Ferradans, Fortia Financial Solutions
- Najah-Imane Bentabet, Fortia Financial Solutions
- Dr Mahmoud El-Haj, Lancaster University
- Rémi Juge, Fortia Financial Solutions


IMPORTANT DATES:

August 16, 2019 (anywhere on earth): Workshop Paper Submissions Deadline
August 26, 2019: Notification of Acceptance
September 6, 2019 (anywhere on earth): Camera Ready Papers
September 18, 2019 Workshop Schedule
Monday September 30, 2019: Workshop Date (Half day).



CALL FOR PAPERS
We invite submissions on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:

Applying core technologies on financial narratives: morphological analysis, disambiguation, tokenization, POS tagging, named entity recognition, chunking, parsing, semantic role labeling, sentiment analysis, document quality and advanced readability metrics etc.
Financial narratives resources: dictionaries, annotated data, tools and technologies etc.
Given the international nature of the conference, we particularly welcome FNP papers reporting non- English and multilingual research, describing the different regulatory regimes within which companies operate internationally.
Submissions may include work in progress as well as finished work. Submissions must have a clear focus on specific issues pertaining to the financial narrative processing whether it is English or multilingual. Descriptions of commercial systems are welcome but authors should be willing to discuss the details of their work. Dual submissions should be disclosed at time of submission.


PAPER SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:

Submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included.

Submissions may consist of no less than four (4) and up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references.

Accepted papers authors are required to submit a camera ready to be included in the final proceedings. Authors of accepted papers will be notified after the notification of acceptance with further details.
Accepted papers will be published on ACL Anthology https://aclanthology.info.
The Proceedings will include oral, poster, short and long papers in the same format in the final proceedings.

Authors of papers accepted for oral or poster presentation at FNP 2019 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented.
We will not accept for publication or presentation the papers that overlap significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere.


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Antonio Moreno Sandoval (UAM, Spain)
Catherine Salzedo (LUMS, Lancaster University, UK)
Denys Proux (Naver Labs, Switzerland)
Djamé Seddah (INRIA-Paris, France)
Eshrag Refaee (Jazan University, Saudi Arabia)
George Giannakopoulos (SKEL Lab – NCSR Demokritos, Greece)
Haithem Afli (Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland)
Houda Bouamor (Fortia Financial Solutions, France)
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)
Sira Ferradans (Fortia Financial Solutions, France)
Steven Young (LUMS, Lancaster University, UK)



Dr. Paul Rayson
Director of UCREL and Reader in Natural Language Processing
Director of Studies (UG)
Group Lead (Data Science)
School of Computing and Communications, InfoLab21, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK.
Web: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/rayson/
Tel: +44 1524 510357 Fax: +44 1524 510492


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