United Arab Emirates

Financial risk prediction is an essential task for risk management in capital markets. While traditional prediction models are built based on the hard information of numerical data, recent studies have shown that the soft information of verbal cues in earnings conference calls is significant for predicting market risk due to its less constrained fashion and direct interaction between managers and analysts. However, most existing models mainly focus on extracting useful semantic information from the textual conference call transcripts but ignore their subtle yet important information of dialogue structures. To bridge this gap, we develop a graph attention network called DialogueGAT for financial risk prediction by simultaneously modeling the speakers and their utterances in dialogues in conference calls. Different from previous studies, we propose a new method for constructing the graph of speakers and utterances in a dialogue, and design contextual attention at both speaker and utterance levels for disentangling their effects on the downstream prediction task. For model evaluation, we extend an existing dataset of conference call transcripts by adding the dialogue structure and speaker information. Empirical results on our dataset of S&amp;P1500 companies demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model over competitive baselines from the extant literature.

EMNLP 2022

DialogueGAT: A Graph Attention Network for Financial Risk Prediction by Modeling the Dialogues in Earnings Conference Calls

earnings conference calls

fintech

graph neural networks

Financial risk prediction is an essential task for risk management in capital markets. While traditional prediction models are built based on the hard information of numerical data, recent studies have shown that the soft information of verbal cues in earnings conference calls is significant for predicting market risk due to its less constrained fashion and direct interaction between managers and analysts. However, most existing models mainly focus on extracting useful semantic information from the textual conference call transcripts but ignore their subtle yet important information of dialogue structures. To bridge this gap, we develop a graph attention network called DialogueGAT for financial risk prediction by simultaneously modeling the speakers and their utterances in dialogues in conference calls. Different from previous studies, we propose a new method for constructing the graph of speakers and utterances in a dialogue, and design contextual attention at both speaker and utterance levels for disentangling their effects on the downstream prediction task. For model evaluation, we extend an existing dataset of conference call transcripts by adding the dialogue structure and speaker information. Empirical results on our dataset of S&P1500 companies demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model over competitive baselines from the extant literature.

workshop paper

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Understanding rich narratives, such as dialogues and stories, often requires natural language processing systems to access relevant knowledge from commonsense knowledge graphs. However, these systems typically retrieve facts from KGs using simple heuristics that disregard the complex challenges of identifying situationally-relevant commonsense knowledge (e.g., contextualization, implicitness, ambiguity).

In this work, we propose the new task of commonsense fact linking, where models are given contexts and trained to identify situationally-relevant commonsense knowledge from KGs. Our novel benchmark, ComFact, contains ~293k in-context relevance annotations for commonsense triplets across four stylistically diverse dialogue and storytelling datasets. Experimental results confirm that heuristic fact linking approaches are imprecise knowledge extractors. Learned fact linking models demonstrate across-the-board performance improvements (~34.6% F1) over these heuristics. Furthermore, improved knowledge retrieval yielded average downstream improvements of 9.8% for a dialogue response generation task. However, fact linking models still significantly underperform humans, suggesting our benchmark is a promising testbed for research in commonsense augmentation of NLP systems.

ComFact: A Benchmark for Linking Contextual Commonsense Knowledge

Topic taxonomies display hierarchical topic structures of a text corpus and provide topical knowledge to enhance various NLP applications. To dynamically incorporate new topic information, several recent studies have tried to expand (or complete) a topic taxonomy by inserting emerging topics identified in a set of new documents. However, existing methods focus only on frequent terms in documents and the local topic-subtopic relations in a taxonomy, which leads to limited topic term coverage and fails to model the global taxonomy structure. In this work, we propose a novel framework for topic taxonomy expansion, named TopicExpan, which directly generates topic-related terms belonging to new topics. Specifically, TopicExpan leverages the hierarchical relation structure surrounding a new topic and the textual content of an input document for topic term generation. This approach encourages newly-inserted topics to further cover important but less frequent terms as well as to keep their relation consistency within the taxonomy. Experimental results on two real-world text corpora show that TopicExpan significantly outperforms other baseline methods in terms of the quality of output taxonomies.

Topic Taxonomy Expansion via Hierarchy-Aware Topic Phrase Generation

To explain NLP models a popular approach is to use importance measures, such as attention, which inform input tokens are important for making a prediction. However, an open question is how well these explanations accurately reflect a model's logic, a property called faithfulness. To answer this question, we propose Recursive ROAR, a new faithfulness metric. This works by recursively masking allegedly important tokens and then retraining the model. The principle is that this should result in worse model performance compared to masking random tokens. The result is a performance curve given a masking-ratio. Furthermore, we propose a summarizing metric using area-between-curves (ABC), which allows for easy comparison across papers, models, and tasks. We evaluate 4 different importance measures on 8 different datasets, using both LSTM-attention models and RoBERTa models. We find that the faithfulness of importance measures is both model-dependent and task-dependent. This conclusion contradicts previous evaluations in both computer vision and faithfulness of attention literature.

Evaluating the Faithfulness of Importance Measures in NLP by Recursively Masking Allegedly Important Tokens and Retraining

Automatic International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding aims to assign multiple ICD codes to a medical note with average length of 3,000+ tokens. This task is challenging due to a high-dimensional space of multi-label assignment (tens of thousands of ICD codes) and the long-tail challenge: only a few codes (common diseases) are frequently assigned while most codes (rare diseases) are infrequently assigned. This study addresses the long-tail challenge by adapting a prompt-based fine-tuning technique with label semantics, which has been shown to be effective under few-shot setting. To further enhance the performance in medical domain, we propose a knowledge-enhanced longformer by injecting three domain-specific knowledge: hierarchy, synonym, and abbreviation with additional pretraining using contrastive learning. Experiments on MIMIC-III-full, a benchmark dataset of code assignment, show that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art method in 14.5% in marco F1 (from 10.3 to 11.8, P<0.001). To further test our model on few-shot setting, we created a new rare diseases coding dataset, MIMIC-III-rare50, on which our model improves marco F1 from 17.1 to 30.4 and micro F1 from 17.2 to 32.6 compared to previous method.

Knowledge Injected Prompt Based Fine-tuning for Multi-label Few-shot ICD Coding

Recent success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has stimulated interest in their ability to understand and work with numbers. Yet, the numerical reasoning over measurements has not been formally studied despite their importance. In this study, we show that PLMs lack the capability required for reasoning over measurements. Furthermore, we find that a language model trained on a measurement-rich corpus shows better performance on understanding measurements. We propose a simple embedding strategy to better distinguish between numbers and units, which leads to a significant improvement in the probing tasks.

Do Language Models Understand Measurements?

Incorporating large-scale pre-trained models with the prototypical neural networks is a de-facto paradigm in few-shot named entity recognition. Existing methods, unfortunately, are not aware of the fact that embeddings from pre-trained models contain a prominently large amount of information regarding word frequencies, biasing prototypical neural networks against learning word entities. This discrepancy constrains the two models' synergy. Thus, we propose a one-line-code normalization method to reconcile such a mismatch with empirical and theoretical grounds. Our experiments based on nine benchmark datasets show the superiority of our method over the counterpart models and are comparable to the state-of-the-art methods. In addition to the model enhancement, our work also provides an analytical viewpoint for addressing the general problems in few-shot name entity recognition or other tasks that rely on pre-trained models or prototypical neural networks.

Reconciliation of Pre-trained Models and Prototypical Neural Networks in Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

Summarizing legal decisions requires the expertise of law practitioners, which is both time- and cost-intensive. This paper presents techniques for extractive summarization of legal decisions in a low-resource setting using limited expert annotated data. We test a set of models that locate relevant content using a sequential model and tackle redundancy by leveraging maximal marginal relevance to compose summaries. We also demonstrate an implicit approach to help train our proposed models generate more informative summaries. Our multi-task learning model variant leverages rhetorical role identification as an auxiliary task to further improve the summarizer. We perform extensive experiments on datasets containing legal decisions from the US Board of Veterans' Appeals and conduct quantitative and expert-ranked evaluations of our models. Our results show that the proposed approaches can achieve ROUGE scores vis-à-vis expert extracted summaries that match those achieved by inter-annotator comparison.

Extractive Summarization of Legal Decisions using Multi-task Learning and Maximal Marginal Relevance

Data-to-text generation is challenging due to the great variety of the input data in terms of domains (e.g., finance vs sports) or schemata (e.g., diverse predicates). Recent end-to-end neural methods thus require substantial training examples to learn to disambiguate and describe the data. Yet, real-world data-to-text problems often suffer from various data-scarce issues: one may have access to only a handful of or no training examples, and/or have to rely on examples in a different domain or schema. To fill this gap, we propose Any-Shot Data-to-Text (ASDOT), a new approach flexibly applicable to diverse settings by making efficient use of any given (or no) examples. ASDOT consists of two steps, data disambiguation and sentence fusion, both of which are amenable to be solved with off-the-shelf pretrained language models (LMs) with optional finetuning. In the data disambiguation stage, we employ the prompted GPT-3 model to understand possibly ambiguous triples from the input data and convert each into a short sentence with reduced ambiguity. The sentence fusion stage then uses an LM like T5 to fuse all the resulting sentences into a coherent paragraph as the final description. We evaluate extensively on various datasets in different scenarios, including the zero-/few-/full-shot settings, and generalization to unseen predicates and out-of-domain data. Experimental results show that ASDOT consistently achieves significant improvement over baselines, e.g., a 30.81 BLEU gain on the DART dataset under the zero-shot setting.

ASDOT: Any-Shot Data-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Models

Adopting contextually appropriate, audience-tailored linguistic styles is critical to the success of user-centric language generation systems (e.g., chatbots, computer-aided writing, dialog systems). While existing approaches demonstrate text style transfer (TST) with large volumes of parallel or non-parallel data, we argue that grounding style on audience-independent external factors is innately limiting for two reasons. First, it is difficult to collect large volumes of audience-specific stylistic data. Second, some stylistic objectives (e.g., persuasiveness, memorability, empathy) are hard to define without audience feedback. 

In this paper, we propose the novel task of style infusion - infusing the stylistic preferences of audiences in pretrained language generation models. Since humans are better at pairwise comparisons than direct scoring - i.e., is Sample-A more persuasive/polite/empathic than Sample-B - we leverage limited pairwise human judgments to bootstrap a style analysis model and augment our seed set of judgments. We then infuse the learned textual style in a GPT-2 based text generator while balancing fluency and style adoption. With quantitative and qualitative assessments, we show that our infusion approach can generate compelling stylized examples with generic text prompts. We make the anonymized code and data accessible.

Audience-Centric Natural Language Generation via Style Infusion

Financial prediction is complex due to the stochastic nature of the stock market. Semi-structured financial documents present comprehensive financial data in tabular formats, such as earnings, profit-loss statements, and balance sheets, and can often contain rich technical analysis along with a textual discussion of corporate history, and management analysis, compliance, and risks. Existing research focuses on the textual and audio modalities of financial disclosures from company conference calls to forecast stock volatility and price movement, but ignores the rich tabular data available in financial reports. Moreover, the economic realm is still plagued with a severe under-representation of various communities spanning diverse demographics, gender, and native speakers. In this work, we show that combining tabular data from financial semi-structured documents with text transcripts and audio recordings not only improves stock volatility and price movement prediction by 5-12% but also reduces gender bias caused due to audio-based neural networks by over 30%.

DialogueGAT: A Graph Attention Network for Financial Risk Prediction by Modeling the Dialogues in Earnings Conference Calls

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ComFact: A Benchmark for Linking Contextual Commonsense Knowledge

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