Transformation of the largest Russian companies’ business vocabulary in annual reports: Data Mining

Abstract

One of the promising areas of business analysis is the development of new methods and tools for accounting of nonfinancial and non-numeric information. There is a significant number of theoretical and practical solutions in this field; however, the issues of the transformation dynamics of companies’ business vocabulary need to be studied more extensively. The article aims to identify and interpret latent information reflecting strategic guidelines and conditions for the economic development of Russian enterprises. The methodology of the study is based on the concepts of narrative economics and multimodal business analytics, which is a system of scientific-practical methods for analyzing the activities of economic entities through the use of data from heterogeneous sources. The Data Mining methods and tools for analyzing and systematizing large volumes of textual information were used. The data for research were retrieved from the annual reports of the largest Russian companies for 2018–2020. Among the main indicators of the business vocabulary transformation considered in the paper are the occurrence of unique key tokens (UKTs) and the dynamics of its change, as well as the main contexts of UKTs relevant to the problem of development. The findings indicate noticeable changes in the vocabulary of Russian companies’ annual reports, such as a decline in covering formal aspects of economic activity and a growing debate on the development in the presence of risk. It is shown that these trends were most clearly manifested in the reports of metallurgical and energy enterprises. The research results can serve as a basis for enhancing the analytical and predictive effectiveness of modern business analysis