In the domain of Finance, there has been 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, manual small-scale research in the Accounting and Finance literature has been scaled up with the aid of NLP, ML, and deep learning methods. For the past 5 years, the FNP workshop has proven to be the leaders in Financial NLP, organising more than six 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 Multiling 2019 Financial narrative Summarisation task at RANLP in Bulgaria, the 1st First Narrative Processing workshop (FNP 2018) at LREC’18 in Japan, the 2nd FNP at NoDaLiDa 2019 in Finland, as well as the 1st Joint Workshop on Financial Narrative Processing and MultiLing Financial Summarisation (FNP-FNS 2020) and the 3rd Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2021), we have had a great deal of positive feedback and interest in the development of the financial narrative processing field, especially from our shared task participants. FNP 2021 was the largest among our events in terms of the number of attendees. The workshop was run as a hybrid event at Lancaster University in the UK attracting more than 120 registrations with participants coming from 87 cities from 35 countries around the globe. We ran a series of three shared tasks competitions focusing on financial text summarisation (FNS), structure detection (FinTOC), and causality detection (FinCausal) shared tasks. The shared tasks attracted more than 100 teams from different universities and organisations around the globe and resulted in large scale experimental results and state-of-the-art methods and approaches applied to financial textual documents. This shows the importance and growth of this field.
The FNP 2021 workshop was a 2-day hybrid event with participants physically joining the workshop at Lancaster University and others online through Microsoft Teams. We had 8 renowned invited speakers, and 22 papers presented orally and in a poster session using Gather Town. The shared tasks were hosted on EvalAi where we have an infrastructure to automatically and quickly evaluate the system results. The event was sponsored by Lancaster University’s DSI and Yseop.com. The granted budget was invested to acquire new data through hiring annotators, organise the event (e.g. Gather Town and Eval-Ai leader-board) and distribute money prizes to the three winning teams (each team was awarded €550). Two AI and NLP Financial Firms joined us in organising the workshop (Fortia.fr and Yseop.com) along with 15 organisers from all around the world. Our workshop organising committee is very diverse and gender balanced.
For the 4th edition of FNP at LREC 2022 we will introduce two new languages, Spanish and Greek in addition to the original English and French datasets. The Spanish and Greek datasets will be considered in the summarisation and the document structure shared tasks as below.
* All FNP proceedings across the years are on ACL Anthology: https://preview.aclanthology.org/fnp-ingestion/venues/fnp/. The 1st FNP was associated with LREC 2018 http://lrec-conf.org/workshops/lrec2018/W27/pdf/book_of_proceedings.pdf
