AnnoFin–A hybrid algorithm to annotate financial text

•AnnoFin helps a user to classify financial text data to ten categories.•AnnoFin, when trained with 30% of data and has an accuracy of 73.56%.•The accuracy increases by 2% if the training data is increased by 10%. In this work, we study the problem of annotating a large volume of Financial text by learning from a small set of human-annotated training data. The training data is prepared by randomly selecting some text sentences from the large corpus of financial text. Conventionally, bootstrapping algorithm is used to annotate large volume of unlabeled data by learning from a small set of annotated data. However, the small set of annotated data have to be carefully chosen as seed data. Thus, our approach is a digress from the conventional approach of bootstrapping as we let the users randomly select the seed data. We show that our proposed algorithm has an accuracy of 73.56% in classifying the financial texts into the different categories (“Accounting”, “Cost”, “Employee”, “Financing”, “Sales”, “Investments”, “Operations”, “Profit”, “Regulations” and “Irrelevant”) even when the training data is just 30% of the total data set. Additionally, the accuracy improves by an approximate average of 2% for an increase of the training data by 10% and the accuracy of our system is 77.91% when the training data is about 50% of the total data set. As a dictionary of hand chosen keywords prepared by domain experts are often used for financial text extraction, we assumed the existence of almost linearly separable hyperplanes between the different classes and therefore, we have used Linear Support Vector Machine along with a modified version of Label Propagation Algorithm which exploits the notion of neighborhood (in Euclidean space) for classification. We believe that our proposed techniques will be of help to Early Warning Systems used in banks where large volumes of unstructured texts need to be processed for better insights about a company.