Financial prediction is complex due to the stochastic nature of the stock market. Semi-structured financial documents present comprehensive financial data in tabular formats, such as earnings, profit-loss statements, and balance sheets, and can often contain rich technical analysis along with a textual discussion of corporate history, and management analysis, compliance, and risks. Existing research focuses on the textual and audio modalities of financial disclosures from company conference calls to forecast stock volatility and price movement, but ignores the rich tabular data available in financial reports. Moreover, the economic realm is still plagued with a severe under-representation of various communities spanning diverse demographics, gender, and native speakers. In this work, we show that combining tabular data from financial semi-structured documents with text transcripts and audio recordings not only improves stock volatility and price movement prediction by 5-12% but also reduces gender bias caused due to audio-based neural networks by over 30%.

Risk prediction is an essential task in financial markets. Merger and Acquisition (M&A) calls provide key insights into the claims made by company executives about the restructuring of the financial firms. Extracting vocal and textual cues from M&A calls can help model the risk associated with such financial activities. To aid the analysis of M&A calls, we curate a dataset of conference call transcripts and their corresponding audio recordings for the time period ranging from 2016 to 2020. We introduce M3ANet, a baseline architecture that takes advantage of the multimodal multi-speaker input to forecast the financial risk associated with the M&A calls. Empirical results prove that the task is challenging, with the pro-posed architecture performing marginally better than strong BERT-based baselines. We release the M3A dataset and benchmark models to motivate future research on this challenging problem domain.