Annual reports published by companies contain important insights regarding their performance and are often analyzed in a manual, subjective manner. We address this point by combining the streams of research on text summarization and topic modelling with the one on sentiment analysis. Our approach consists of the steps of text summarization using BERTSUMEXT, topic modelling with LDA, sentiment analysis with FinBERT, and performance prediction with Decision Trees and Random Forest. The result provides decision makers with an interpretable and condensed representation of the content of annual reports, together with its relationship to future company performance. We evaluate our approach on 10-K reports, demonstrating both its interpretability for analysts and explanatory power regarding future company performance.
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