Publications

DocFin: Multimodal Financial Prediction and Bias Mitigation using Semi-structured Documents

Findings of EMNLP 2022

Publication date: December 11, 2022

Puneet Mathur, Mihir Goyal, Ramit Sawhney, Ritik Mathur, Jochen L. Leidner, Franck Dernoncourt, Dinesh Manocha

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 more than 100's tables worth of 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%.