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A Graph-Based Method for Unsupervised Knowledge Discovery from Financial Texts

The need for manual review of various financial texts, such as company filings and news, presents a major bottleneck in financial analysts’ work. Thus, there is great potential for the application of NLP methods, tools and resources to fulfil a genuine industrial need in finance. In this paper, we show how this potential can be fulfilled by presenting an end-to-end, fully unsupervised method for knowledge discovery from financial texts. Our method creatively integrates existing resources to construct automatically a knowledge graph of companies and related entities as well as to carry out unsupervised analysis of the resulting graph to provide quantifiable and explainable insights from the produced knowledge. The graph construction integrates entity processing and semantic expansion, before carrying out open relation extraction. We illustrate our method by calculating automatically the environmental rating for companies in the S&P 500, based on company filings with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). We then show the usefulness of our method in this setting by providing an assessment of our method’s outputs with an independent MSCI source.