FNS 2020
Financial Narrative Summarisation (FNS 2020) To be held at FNP 2020 workshop at COLING 2020. Spain, Barcelona.
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News: The training and validation data has been released. If you wish to access it, please access the google drive link below:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1o7iW-cpIXCpQI7mNaYJ4T-2vQOwgRbVw

We aim to use the JRouge package for ROUGE, from Marina Litvak's team (https://bitbucket.org/nocgod/jrouge/wiki/Home), using multiple variants (ROUGE-2, ROUGE-SU4).

We also aim to use NPowER package (https://github.com/ggianna/SummaryEvaluation/tree/master/Releases/V1), which includes AutoSummENG as one of the outputs. The parameters will be the default (minNgram=3, maxNgram=3, dist/Dwin=3).
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Shared task link: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fns2020/
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Task
For FNS 2020 task we focus on annual reports produced by UK firms listed on The London Stock Exchange (LSE). In the UK and elsewhere, annual report structure is much less rigid than those produced in the US. Companies produce glossy brochures with a much looser structure, and this makes automatic summarisation of narratives in UK annual reports a challenging task. This is due to the fact that the structure of those documents needs to be extracted first in order to summarise the narrative sections of the annual reports. This can happen by detecting narrative sections that usually include the management disclosures rather than the financial statements of the annual reports.

In this task we will introduce a new summarisation task which we call Financial Narrative Summarisation. In this task the summary requires extraction from different key sections found in the 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. The MultiLing team along with help from Barcelona’s UPF summarisation team will help in organising the shared task including the generation of the evaluation results and final proceedings. The MultiLing team have a rich experience in organising summarisation tasks since 2011.
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Important Dates

December 1st, 2020: Registration opens.
February 17th, 2020: Release of training set.
March 23rd, 2020: Release of test set.
April 6th, 2020: Registration deadline.
April 13th, Submission deadline.
May 1st, 2020: Release of results.
Sep 13th, 2020: Workshop day.
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Shared Task Co-Organisers
Mahmoud El-Haj (Lancaster University)
Ahmed AbuRa’ed (Universitat Pompeu Fabra),
Nikiforos Pittaras (NCSR, Demokritos).
Marina Litvak (Sami Shamoon College of Engineering).
George Giannakopoulos (SKEL Lab – NCSR Demokritos).