[AISWorld] Call for Participation: FINTOC'3 Shared Task

[FinTOC SharedTask]

Please find the FINTOC'3 2021 Shared Task Call for Participation below.


Apologies for cross-posting.


With best wishes

FinTOC3 Shared Task organizing committee


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Call for participation:

FNS-2021 Shared Task: “FINTOC’3 -Table Of Content extraction from Financial
Documents”

To be held at The 3rd Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2021)

Lancaster, United Kingdom [online] on 15 and 16 September 2021. A free 2
day event.

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Shared Task URL: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fintoc2021/

Workshop URL: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/fnp2021/

Participation Form: http://bit.ly/34xWCCp

_____________________________________________

Awards and Prizes:

The winning team for FinTOC 2021 shared task will receive an achievement
certificate and a money prize worth US$650. The team will also be given the
chance to present their work at the workshop.

_____________________________________________


Shared Task Description:

A vast amount of financial documents are created and published constantly
in machine-readable formats (generally PDF file format), with only minimal
structure information. Firms use such documents to report their activities,
financial situation or potential investment plans to shareholders,
investors and the financial markets, basically corporate annual reports
containing detailed financial and operational information.

In some countries as in the US or in France, regulators as EDGAR SEC or AMF
require firms to follow a certain template when reporting their financial
results to insure standardisation and consistency across firms’
disclosures. In other European countries, on the other hand, the management
usually have more discretion on what where and how to report resulting in
lack of standardisation between financial documents published within the
same market.

Existing work on book and document table of contents (TOC) recognition has
been almost all on small size, application-dependent, and domain-specific
datasets. However, TOC of documents from different domains differ
significantly in their visual layout and style, making TOC recognition a
challenging problem for a large scale collection of heterogeneous documents
and books. Compared to regular books (mostly provided in a full text format
with limited structural information such as pages and paragraphs),
Financial documents, containing textual and non textual content, have a
more sophisticated structure including, parts, sections, sub-sections,
sub-sub-sections.

In this shared task, we focus on analysing Financial Prospectuses; official
PDF documents in which investment funds precisely describe their
characteristics and investment modalities. Although the content they must
include is often regulated, their format is not standardized and displays a
great deal of variability ranging from plain text format, towards more
graphical and tabular presentation of data and information. The majority of
prospectuses are published without a table of content (TOC), which is
usually needed to help readers to navigate within the document by following
a simple outline of headers and page numbers, and assist legal teams in
checking if all the contents required are fully included. Thus, automatic
analyses of prospectuses to extract their structure is becoming more and
more vital to many firms across the world.

The third edition of the FinTOC shared task proposes the same two tracks as
the FinTOC’2 edition: one track for english documents and another for
french documents, and it will score systems on both Title detection and TOC
generation performance. We have revised the task and greatly simplified
data formats to make it as smooth as possible for every interested
researcher to participate and submit their systems’ outputs at FinTOC’3.

Participants need to register. Once registered, all participating teams
will be provided with a common training dataset containing PDF documents
and the associated TOC annotation.

To participate please use the registration form below to add details of
your team: https://forms.gle/qawe1dP13MAsTdLu6 (this is now open as of
19/04/2021)




_____________________________________________

Important dates:

• 1st Call for participation: 29 April 2021

• 2nd Call for participation: 15 May 2021

• Training set release: 1st of June 2021

• Blind test set release: 1st of July 2021.

• Systems submission 1st of August 2021

• Release of results: 1st of September 2021

_____________________________________________

Contact:

For any questions on the shared task please contact us on:

fin.toc.task at gmail.com

_____________________________________________

Shared Task Organisers:

- Dr Ismail El Maarouf, Fortia Financial Solutions

- Dr Juyeon Kang, Fortia Financial Solutions

- Abderrahim Aitazzi, Fortia Financial Solutions