It’s Time to Reason: Annotating Argumentation Structures in Financial Earnings Calls: The FinArg Dataset

Abstract

With the goal of reasoning on the financial textual data, we present in this paper, a novel approach for annotating arguments, their components and relations in the transcripts of earnings conference calls (ECCs). The proposed scheme is driven from the argumentation theory at the micro-structure level of discourse. We further conduct a manual annotation study with four annotators on 136 documents. We obtained inter-annotator agreement of lpha_{U} = 0.70 for argument components and lpha = 0.81 for argument relations. The final created corpus, with the size of 804 documents, as well as the annotation guidelines are publicly available for researchers in the domains of computational argumentation, finance and FinNLP.