NLP And IR Applications For Financial Reporting And Non-Financial Disclosure. Framework Implementation And Roadmap For Feasible Integration With The Accounting Process

Abstract

Corporations produce financial and non-financial reports containing structured and unstructured data. In general, all organisations report information of some kind. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) were fields developed from approximately the 1950s and have presented important applications, especially in the last three decades. Nevertheless, applications in accounting and finance have not developed accordingly, and a comprehensive framework is missing in the existing literature. This paper examines how NLP and IR can facilitate reporting and disclosure, both Financial and Non-Financial. The paper provides a brief literature review on NLP/IR applications in accounting and finance. It better informs and expands on the discussion of NLP/IR applications in academic research, professional organisations (i.e., IFRS), and industry. It explores some innovative applications of NLP/IR in unstructured data and its use in reporting and disclosure and FinTech applications. The main contribution is the definition of a complete framework that consistently analyses the possible NLP/IR applications in the accounting processes. We find that there can be many more applications of NLP/IR in accounting and finance and suggest future directions for research.