Comparative Narrative Analysis at École Polytechnique

The Challenge A research team at École Polytechnique, led by Professor Charles-Albert Lehalle, sought to investigate the informational efficiency of European corporate reporting. Their goal was ambitious: to conduct a comparative analysis of how companies in France, the UK, and Germany disclose risks related to inflation, raw material costs, and tariffs. However, performing this analysis required more than just downloading PDFs; it necessitated a "semantic segmentation" of thousands of reports to isolate specific narrative sections (e.g., "Company Description" vs. "Legal Boilerplate") across three different languages and regulatory jurisdictions.

The Solution FinancialReports empowered the team with high-volume API access and beta access to our text-parsing infrastructure.

1. Semantic Segmentation: By accessing our Markdown feed, the students could programmatically slice documents into meaningful sections, isolating the "Management Discussion" from standard legal disclaimers.
2. Cross-Border Standardization: Our unified data model allowed them to compare narrative quality across jurisdictions (e.g., contrasting the verbosity of a UK Annual Report with a German Geschäftsbericht) without building separate parsers for each country.
3. Market Impact Study: The team linked these narrative insights to market data to study "Post-Earnings Announcement Drift," validating whether superior disclosure quality correlates with market efficiency.

The Result The team successfully launched their comparative study, moving rapidly from data acquisition to insight generation. By leveraging FinancialReports for the "heavy lifting" of document collection and parsing, they could focus on the high-value work of measuring discrepancies in reporting quality across Europe's major economies.