Submitted:
09 May 2023
Posted:
10 May 2023
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Abstract
Keywords:
1. Introduction
- We created a new annotated dataset of causes-and-effect relationships and performance term classifications based on the S&P Financial Company 10-K reports.
- We created a pipeline to automatically read a text document and process it to create a knowledge graph.
- We compared the extracted causalities against a domain taxonomy and classify the extracted causalities.
- We have developed a novel approach to bridge machine reading with domain expertise (e.g., a pre-built taxonomy from domain experts)
- The presented architecture can be used as a framework for extracting causal information in other domains, for example in medical texts.
2. Related Work
3. Data
<causal-relation>When a<cause>policyholder or insured gets sick or hurt</cause>, the Company<trigger>pays</trigger><outcome>
cash benefits fairly and promptly for eligible claims</outcome>
</causal-relation>.
| Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 2 description |
|---|---|---|
| Performance (P) | Investors (INV) | The economic or financial outcome of the firm, which benefits investors, shareholders, debtholders, or financers. |
| Customers (CUS) | The value and utility of products/services the firm creates for and delivers to customers, clients, or users. | |
| Employees (EMP) | The benefits and welfare employees (workers and managers) receive from an organization. | |
| Society (SOC) | An organization’s efforts and impacts on addressing community, environmental, and general public concerns. | |
| Unclassified | ||
| Non-performance (NP) | Sentences which doesn’t come under the performance category. |
4. Methodology
| Algorithm 1:Text to Knowledge Graph. The sample output of Algorithm 1 is shown in Figure 2 |
|
4.1. Data Preparation and Preprocessing
4.2. Machine learning for automatic causal sentence detection and extraction
4.3. Machine learning for automatic causality extraction
| P(Span) | R(Span) | F1(Span) | P(Distil) | R(Distil) | F1(Distil) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cause | 0.82 | 0.86 | 0.84 | 0.78 | 0.93 | 0.85 |
| Causal trigger | 0.93 | 0.97 | 0.95 | 0.77 | 0.86 | 0.81 |
| Effect | 0.86 | 0.90 | 0.88 | 0.88 | 0.94 | 0.91 |
4.4. Machine learning for automatic labeling of stakeholder taxonomy
4.5. Visualizing the output
5. Error Analysis
Example 1.
Input text:Over time, certain sectors of the financial services industry have become more concentrated as institutions involved in a broad range of financial services have been acquired by or merged into other firms. These developments could result in the Company’s competitors gaining greater capital and other resources, such as a broader range of products and services and geographic diversity. The Company may experience pricing pressures as a result of these factors and as some of its competitors seek to increase market share by reducing prices or paying higher rates of interest on deposits.
Step 1 (extracting causal sentences using BERT) produces:
The Company may experience pricing pressures as a result of these factors and as some of its competitors seek to increase market share by reducing prices or paying higher rates of interest on deposits.
Step 2: Extract causalities (which part of the sentence is cause/effect in the classified causal sentence in Step 1, above)
Gold data:
O E E E E E CT CT CT O O C O O O O O C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C
Prediction:
E E E E E E CT CT CT O O C O O E E C E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E
Example 2.
Input text:In times of market stress, unanticipated market movements, or unanticipated claims experience resulting from greater than expected morbidity, mortality, longevity, or persistency, the effectiveness of the Company’s risk management strategies may be limited, resulting in losses to the Company. Under difficult or less liquid market conditions, the Company’s risk management strategies may be ineffective or more difficult or expensive to execute because other market participants may be using the same or similar strategies to manage risk.
Step 1: Classify whether a sentence is causal or not using the transformer-based model (BERT):
Under difficult or less liquid market conditions, the Company’s risk management strategies may be ineffective or more difficult or expensive to execute because other market participants may be using the same or similar strategies to manage risk.
Step 2: Extract causalities, i.e. which part of the sentence is cause/effect in the classified causal sentence in Step 1.
Gold data:
O O O O O O O C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C CT E E E E E E E E E E E E E E Prediction:
O C C C C E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E CT C C C C C C C C C C C C C C
Example 3.
Input text:If the contractual counterparty made a claim against the receivership (or conservatorship) for breach of contract, the amount paid to the counterparty would depend upon, among other factors, the receivership (or conservatorship) assets available to pay the claim and the priority of the claim relative to others. In addition, the FDIC may enforce most contracts entered into by the insolvent institution, notwithstanding any provision that would terminate, cause a default, accelerate, or give other rights under the contract solely because of the insolvency, the appointment of the receiver (or conservator), or the exercise of rights or powers by the receiver (or conservator).
Step 1: The causal label is produced using the transformer-based model (BERT): In addition, the FDIC may enforce most contracts entered into by the insolvent institution, notwithstanding any provision that would terminate, cause a default accelerate, or give other rights.
Step 2: Extract causalities (which part of the sentence is cause/effect in the classified causal sentence in step 1)
Gold data:
O O C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C CT O E E E E E E
Prediction - DistilBERT:
O O O E O C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C E E E E E E
Prediction - SpanBERT:
O O C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C CT E E E E E E E
6. Conclusion
Author Contributions
Funding
Data Availability Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
Abbreviations
| NLP | Natural Language Processing |
| IFAC | International Federation of Accountants |
| CSR | Corporate Social Responsibility |
| ESG | Environmental, Social, and Governance |
| SEM | Structural Equation Modeling |
| SCITE | Self-attentive BiLSTM-CRF wIth Transferred Embeddings |
| BiLSTM-CRF | Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory-Conditional Random Field |
| CNN | Convolutional neural network |
| NLTK | Natural Language Toolkit |
| SEC | Securities and Exchange Commission |
| BERT | Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers |
Appendix A
Appendix A.1
| Precision | Recall | F1-Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beginning of effect | 0.67 | 0.06 | 0.10 |
| Beginning of cause | 0.68 | 0.27 | 0.39 |
| Inside of cause | 0.76 | 0.83 | 0.79 |
| Inside of causal trigger | 0.76 | 0.95 | 0.84 |
| Inside of effect | 0.72 | 0.94 | 0.82 |
| Beginning of causal trigger | 0.89 | 0.85 | 0.87 |
Appendix A.2
| Precision | Recall | F1-Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beginning of effect | 0.62 | 0.63 | 0.62 |
| Beginning of cause | 0.56 | 0.59 | 0.57 |
| Inside of cause | 0.78 | 0.87 | 0.83 |
| Inside of causal trigger | 0.94 | 0.96 | 0.95 |
| Inside of effect | 0.84 | 0.90 | 0.87 |
| Beginning of causal trigger | 0.94 | 0.96 | 0.95 |
Appendix A.3
| Precision | Recall | F1-Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beginning of effect | 1.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Beginning of cause | 0.83 | 0.02 | 0.04 |
| Inside of cause | 0.70 | 0.87 | 0.77 |
| Inside of causal trigger | 0.63 | 0.70 | 0.66 |
| Inside of effect | 0.71 | 0.91 | 0.80 |
| Beginning of causal trigger | 0.74 | 0.67 | 0.70 |
Appendix B
| Precision | Recall | F1-Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cause | 0.49 | 0.28 | 0.36 |
| Causal trigger | 0.05 | 0.05 | 0.05 |
| Effect | 0.47 | 0.38 | 0.42 |
| Precision | Recall | F1-Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-Performance | 0.72 | 0.80 | 0.76 |
| Performance | 0.12 | 0.08 | 0.10 |
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| 1 | However, the 100% agreement does not imply complete consistency, e.g. some phrases included the determiner ’the’ in some sentences but omitted them in others. |


| P(Span) | R(Span) | F1(Span) | P(Distil) | R(Distil) | F1(Distil) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cause | 0.83 | 0.88 | 0.85 | 0.79 | 0.87 | 0.83 |
| Causal trigger | 0.93 | 0.97 | 0.95 | 0.91 | 0.93 | 0.92 |
| Effect | 0.87 | 0.91 | 0.89 | 0.80 | 0.94 | 0.86 |
| Precision | Recall | F1-Score | Support | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business Performance | 0.58 | 0.65 | 0.62 | 12532 |
| Business Non-performance | 0.94 | 0.93 | 0.94 | 1976 |
| Precision | Recall | F1-Score | Support | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer | 0.11 | 0.06 | 0.08 | 31 |
| Employee | 0.61 | 0.52 | 0.56 | 204 |
| Investor | 0.56 | 0.70 | 0.62 | 1013 |
| Society | 0.22 | 0.11 | 0.15 | 35 |
| Unclassified | 0.36 | 0.32 | 0.34 | 693 |
| Business Non-performance | 0.94 | 0.93 | 0.94 | 12532 |
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