We present the FinCausal 2020 Shared Task on Causality Detection in Financial Documents and the associated FinCausal dataset, and discuss the participating systems and results. Two sub-tasks are proposed : a binary classification task (Task 1) and a relation extraction task (Task 2). A total of 16 teams submitted runs across the two Tasks and 13 of them contributed with a system description paper. This workshop is associated to the Joint Workshop on Financial Narrative Processing and MultiLing Financial Summarisation (FNP-FNS 2020), held at The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING’2020), Barcelona, Spain on September 12, 2020.

This paper introduces Habibi the first Arabic Song Lyrics corpus. The corpus comprises more than 30,000 Arabic song lyrics in 6 Arabic dialects for singers from 18 different Arabic countries. The lyrics are segmented into more than 500,000 sentences (song verses) with more than 3.5 million words. I provide the corpus in both comma separated value (csv) and annotated plain text (txt) file formats. In addition, I converted the csv version into JavaScript Object Notation (json) and eXtensible Markup Language (xml) file formats. To experiment with the corpus I run extensive binary and multi-class experiments for dialect and country-of-origin identification. The identification tasks include the use of several classical machine learning and deep learning models utilising different word embeddings. For the binary dialect identification task the best performing classifier achieved a testing accuracy of 93 %. This was achieved using a word-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) utilising a Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) word embeddings model. The results overall show all classical and deep learning models to outperform our baseline, which demonstrates the suitability of the corpus for both dialect and country-of-origin identification tasks. I am making the corpus and the trained CBOW word embeddings freely available for research purposes.

The Financial Narrative Summarisation task at MultiLing 2019 aims to demonstrate the value and challenges of applying automatic text summarisation to financial text written in English, usually referred to as financial narrative disclosures. The task dataset has been extracted from UK annual reports published in PDF file format. The participants were asked to provide structured summaries, based on real-world, publicly available financial annual reports of UK firms by extracting information from different key sections. Participants were asked to generate summaries that reflects the analysis and assessment of the financial trend of the business over the past year, as provided by annual reports. The evaluation of the summaries was performed using AutoSummENG and Rouge automatic metrics. This paper focuses mainly on the data creation process.

Creating high-quality wide-coverage multilingual semantic lexicons to support knowledge-based approaches is a challenging time-consuming manual task. This has traditionally been performed by linguistic experts : a slow and expensive process. We present an experiment in which we adapt and evaluate crowdsourcing methods employing native speakers to generate a list of coarse-grained senses under a common multilingual semantic taxonomy for sets of words in six languages. 451 non-experts (including 427 Mechanical Turk workers) and 15 expert participants semantically annotated 250 words manually for Arabic, Chinese, English, Italian, Portuguese and Urdu lexicons. In order to avoid erroneous (spam) crowdsourced results, we used a novel task-specific two-phase filtering process where users were asked to identify synonyms in the target language, and remove erroneous senses.