Call for participation: FNS-2023 Shared Task: "Financial Narrative Summarisation"

To be held at The 5th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2023) at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2023),
Sorrento, Italy, from 15 to 18 December 2023.

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Shared Task URL: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fns2023/

Workshop URL: https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2023/

Registration Form: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfivRaThycvYTMhUsAU1QZqM1yBtLptwm7FyuF4BQmbtkQnrA/viewform]

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The winning team will receive an achievement certificate and they will present their work at the workshop.


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Shared Task Description:


This year the FNS shared task includes annual reports in 3 languages: Greek, Spanish and English.

The Structure-based Financial Narrative Summarisation (FNS) aims to demonstrate the value and challenges of applying automatic text summarisation to financial text written in English, usually referred to as financial narrative disclosures.

The task dataset has been extracted from UK annual reports published in PDF file format. The participants will be asked to provide structured summaries, based on real-world, publicly available financial annual reports of UK firms by extracting information from different key sections.

Participants will be asked to generate summaries that reflects the analysis and assessment of the financial trend of the business over the past year, as provided by annual reports. The evaluation of the summaries will be performed using Rouge automatic metrics.

The shared task requires extraction from different key sections found in the annual reports produced by UK firms listed on The London Stock Exchange (LSE), as well as Spanish and Greek annual reports.

Those sections are usually referred to as "narrative sections" or "front-end" sections and they usually contain textual information and reviews by the firm's management and board of directors.

Sections containing financial statements in terms of tables and numbers are usually referred to as "back-end" sections and are not supposed to be part of the narrative summaries.

UK annual reports are lengthy documents with around 80 pages on average, some annual reports could span over more than 250 pages, making the summarisation task a challenging but an academically interesting one.

For the purpose of this task we will ask the participants to produce one summary for each annual report. The summary length should not exceed 1000 words.

We advise that the summary is generated/extracted based on the narrative sections, therefore the participating summarisers need to be trained to detect narrative sections before creating the summaries.

FNS brings forth experience from previous years of Financial Narrative Processing workshops, but also from the MultiLing (multilingual summarization) community to form the current organizing team.

To register for the task, please fill in the appropriate form in the following link: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfivRaThycvYTMhUsAU1QZqM1yBtLptwm7FyuF4BQmbtkQnrA/viewform].

Registration will result in subscription to the task's mailing list. Registration links for other tasks can be found in the related pages of the FNP 2023 website.

We encourage supporting of at least two languages. The multi-lingual systems will be highlighted.

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Important dates:

1st Call for papers & shared task participants: July 01, 2023

2nd Call for papers & shared task participants: July 15, 2023

Training set release: July 20, 2023

Blind test set release: September 15, 2023

Systems submission: September 30, 2023

Release of results: October 10, 2023

Paper submission deadline: October 22, 2023 (anywhere in the world)

Papers notification of acceptance: November 05, 2023

Camera ready submission deadline: November 15, 2023

Workshop date (1 day event): December 15-18, 2023 (exact date to be announced)

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Contact:

For any questions on the shared task please contact us on:

fns.shared.task@gmail.com

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Shared Task Organisers:

- Mahmoud El-Haj (Lancaster University)

- Nikiforos Pittaras (SKEL Lab, NCSR Demokritos)

- Marina Litvak (Sami Shamoon College of Engineering)

- George Giannakopoulos (SKEL Lab, NCSR Demokritos)

- Antonio Moreno Sandoval (UAM, Madrid)

- Blanca Carbajo Coronado (UAM, Madrid)

- Aris Kosmopoulos (SciFY PNPC)

- Ilias Zavitsanos (SKEL Lab, NCSR Demokritos)