Text analysis in financial disclosures

Financial disclosure analysis and Knowledge extraction is an important financial analysis problem. Prevailing methods depend predominantly on quantitative ratios and techniques, which suffer from limitations like window dressing and past focus. Most of the information in a firm's financial disclosures is in unstructured text and contains valuable information about its health. Humans and machines fail to analyze it satisfactorily due to the enormous volume and unstructured nature, respectively. Researchers have started analyzing text content in disclosures recently. This paper covers the previous work in unstructured data analysis in Finance and Accounting. It also explores the state of art methods in computational linguistics and reviews the current methodologies in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Specifically, it focuses on research related to text source, linguistic attributes, firm attributes, and mathematical models employed in the text analysis approach. This work contributes to disclosure analysis methods by highlighting the limitations of the current focus on sentiment metrics and highlighting broader future research areas

Bankruptcy prediction using disclosure text features

A public firm's bankruptcy prediction is an important financial research problem because of the security price downside risks. Traditional methods rely on accounting metrics that suffer from shortcomings like window dressing and retrospective focus. While disclosure text-based metrics overcome some of these issues, current methods excessively focus on disclosure tone and sentiment. There is a requirement to relate meaningful signals in the disclosure text to financial outcomes and quantify the disclosure text data. This work proposes a new distress dictionary based on the sentences used by managers in explaining financial status. It demonstrates the significant differences in linguistic features between bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms. Further, using a large sample of 500 bankrupt firms, it builds predictive models and compares the performance against two dictionaries used in financial text analysis. This research shows that the proposed stress dictionary captures unique information from disclosures and the predictive models based on its features have the highest accuracy.