DiMSum: Distributed and Multilingual Summarization of Financial Narratives

This paper was submitted for Financial Narrative Summarization (FNS) task in FNP-2022 workshop. The objective of the task was to generate not more than 1000 words summaries for the annual financial reports written in English, Spanish and Greek languages. The central idea of this paper is to demonstrate automatic ways of identifying key narrative sections and their contributions towards generating summaries of financial reports. We have observed a few limitations in the previous works: First, the complete report was being considered for summary generation instead of key narrative sections. Second, many of the works followed manual or heuristic-based techniques to identify narrative sections. Third, sentences from key narrative sections were abruptly dropped to limit the summary to the desired length. To overcome these shortcomings, we introduced a novel approach to automatically learn key narrative sections and their weighted contributions to the reports. Since the summaries may come from various parts of the reports, the summary generation process was distributed amongst the key narrative sections based on the weights identified, later combined to have an overall summary. We also showcased that our approach is adaptive to various report formats and languages.