SPread: Automated Financial Metric Extraction and Spreading Tool from Earnings Reports

Abstract

In this paper, we present SPread, an automated financial metric extraction and spreading tool from earnings reports. The tool is created in a document-agnostic fashion, and uses an interpolation of tagging methods to capture arbitrarily complicated expressions. SPread can handle single-line items as well as metrics broken down into sub-items. A validation layer further improves the performance of upstream modules and enables the tool to reach an F1 performance of more than 87% for metrics expressed in tabular format, and 76% for metrics in free-form text. The results are displayed to end-users in an interactive web interface, which allows them to locate, compare, validate, adjust, and export the values.