Multilingual financial narrative processing: analyzing annual reports in English, Spanish, and Portuguese

This chapter describes and evaluates the use of information extraction (IE) and natural language processing (NLP) methods for extraction and analysis of financial annual reports in three languages: English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The work described retains information on document structure which is needed to enable a clear distinction between narrative and financial statement components of annual reports and between individual sections within the narratives component. Extraction accuracy varies between languages with English exceeding 95%. We apply the extraction methods on a comprehensive sample of annual reports published by UK, Spanish, and Portuguese non-financial firms between 2003 and 2014.