CALL FOR ABSTRACTS:

The 3rd Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2021)


To be held at Lancaster University as a Data Science Institute event. This year we are running a 2 day free event sponsored and funded by the Data Science Institute (DSI) at Lancaster University and Yseop.com. This is an international gathering of researchers, practitioners and keynote speakers working on Financial Narratives and Financial NLP from computing, accounting & finance and linguisitcs. This will be an online event with no registration fees.

Workshop URL: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2021/

EasyChair Submission URL: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fnp2021


We introduce 3 shared tasks as follows:
1) Financial summarisation (FNS 2021),
2) Financial Reports structure detection (FinTOC 2021),
3) Causality Identification in Financial documents (FinCausal 2021).
Links to shared tasks can be found on: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/shared-tasks/

AWARDS AND PRIZES:
The winning team from each shared task will receive an achievement certificate and a money prize worth US$650. Each team will also be given the chance to present their work at the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES:
- First call for abstracts 26 April 2021
- First call for shared task participants 1 May 2021
- Second call for abstracts 26 May 2021
- Second call for shared task participants 1 June 2021
- Abstracts submission deadline 10 August 2021 (extended)
- Abstracts notification of acceptance: 15 August 2021
- Shared task results & winning teams: 15 August 2021
- Workshop and shared task dates: 15 September 2021


CALL FOR Abstracts:
We invite abstracts describing original, completed or ongoing, unpublished research. We welcome abstract submissions, in theory, methodology, as well as resources and applications in all areas related to Financial Natural Language Processing and Financial Text Analysis. We also welcome abstract submissions on negative results as well as submissions highlighting challenges faced in industrial or academic settings. Abstract should be 1 page long and a maximum of 500 words. In your abstract please explain the topic you are looking forward to present, is it a complete, ongoing or future work, what audience are you targeting (e.g. NLP, Summarisation, Accounting and Finance …etc) and findings and conclusions that emerged from your work. Abstracts must be submitted through the EasyChair submission system and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee. All submissions will be reviewed on the basis of both individual criteria and global criteria https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fnp2021.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be asked to submit a 4-8 paper describing their work in details including methodologies, results and findings. All accepted papers will be published in an open access and indexed proceedings. The workshop is free to attend and no registration fees are required.

LIST OF TOPICS:
We invite abstracts 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 labelling, sentiment analysis, document quality and advanced readability metrics etc.
- Using NLP to detect misreporting in relation to diversity and wellbeing on issues related to gender, ethnicity, women at work as well as employee mental health and stability.
- Financial narratives resources: dictionaries, annotated data, tools and technologies etc.
- Summarisation across domains and sources that are related to finance (e.g. company blogs, product reviews, market briefs, etc.), this includes financial multilingual and cross-lingual summarisation using single-document summarisation, multi-document summarisation, summarisation evaluation, headline generation, cross-domain/cross-topic summarisation.
- Given the international nature of the event, we particularly welcome FNP abstracts reporting non- English and multilingual research, describing the different regulatory regimes within which companies operate internationally.
- On going research and preliminary results are welcome

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
- Emmanuel Walckenaer, CEO, Yseop, Paris, France.
- Prof Jochen L Leidner – Sheffield University. Sheffield, UK.
- Dr Kim Trottier – HEC Montréal. Montréal, Canada.
- Prof Steven Young – Lancaster University. Lancaster, UK.
- Dr Claire Hardy – Lancaster University. Lancaster, UK.
- Prof Antonio Moreno – UAM. Madrid, Spain.
- Dr Vasiliki Athanasakou – Sint Mary’s University, Canada
- Dr Raymond Ng – Signal AI, London, UK.

ORGANISING COMMITTEE:
- Dr Mahmoud El-Haj, Lancaster University (General Chair)
- Prof Paul Rayson, Lancaster University (FNP Program Chair)
- Nadhem Zmandar, Lancaster University (Publication Chair and FNS Organiser)
- Dr Houda Bouamor, CMU, Qatar (FNP Program Chair)
- Dr Marina Litvak, Shamoon Academic College of Engineering (FNS Organiser)
- Dr George Giannakopoulos, NCSR Demokritos (FNS Organiser)
- Dr Ahmed AbuRaed, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (FNS Organiser)
- Nikiforos Pittaras, NCSR Demokritos (Publicity Chair)
- Dr Ismail El Maarouf, Fortia Financial Solution (FinToc Organiser)
- Abderrahim Aitazzi, Fortia (FinTOC Shared Task Organizer)
- Dr Juyeon Kang, Fortia Financial Solution (FinToc Shared Task Organiser)
- Dominique Mariko, Yseop Lab (FinCausal Shared Task Organizer)
- Hanna Abi-Akl, Yseop Lab (FinCausal Shared Task Organizer)
- Hugues de Mazancourt, Yseop Lab (FinCausal Shared Task Organizer)
- Estelle Labidurie, Yseop Lab (FinCausal Shared Task Organizer)

PUBLICATION:
FNP 2021 proceedings will be published in ACL Anthology https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/. The proceedings will be made available online for free and are open access.

ANTI-HARASSMENT POLICY:
The workshop supports the ACL anti-harassment policy.
https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Anti-Harassment_Policy

VENUE:
The workshop will be an online event. If the rules allow it we may run a hybrid workshop hosted at Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.

CONTACT:
For any questions please contact us on: fnp2021@easychair.org