Effective Performance Measurement: Challenges and Opportunities in KPI Extraction from Earnings Calls

Rasmus T. Aavang, Rasmus Tjalk-Bøggild, Alexandre Iolov, Giovanni Rizzi, Mike Zhang, Johannes Bjerva


Abstract
Earnings calls are a key source of financial information about public companies. However, extracting information from these calls is difficult.Unlike the templatic filings required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to report a company’s financial situation, earnings conference calls have no built-in labels, are unstructured, and feature conversational language.We explore this challenging domain by assessing the information captured by models trained on SEC filings and in-context learning methods. To establish a baseline, we first evaluate the generalization capabilities of SEC-trained models across established SEC datasets.To support our investigation, we introduce three novel benchmarks: (1) SEC Filings Benchmark (SECB), (2) Earnings Calls Benchmark (ECB), and ECB-A, a subset with 5,346 expert annotations to support our qualitative analysis.We find that encoder-based models struggle with the domain shift. Finally, we propose a system utilizing LLMs to perform open-ended extraction from unstructured call transcripts, verified by human evaluation (79.7% precision), providing a baseline for this valuable domain through the consistent tracking of emergent KPIs.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-industry.100
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Yunyao Li, Georg Rehm, Mei Tu
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1434–1460
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-industry.100/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rasmus T. Aavang, Rasmus Tjalk-Bøggild, Alexandre Iolov, Giovanni Rizzi, Mike Zhang, and Johannes Bjerva. 2026. Effective Performance Measurement: Challenges and Opportunities in KPI Extraction from Earnings Calls. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track), pages 1434–1460, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Effective Performance Measurement: Challenges and Opportunities in KPI Extraction from Earnings Calls (Aavang et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-industry.100.pdf