A deep learning approach of financial distress recognition combining text

Abstract

The financial distress of listed companies not only harms the interests of internal managers and employees but also brings considerable risks to external investors and other stakeholders. Therefore, it is crucial to construct an efficient financial distress prediction model. However, most existing studies use financial indicators or text features without contextual information to predict financial distress and fail to extract critical details disclosed in Chinese long texts for research. This research introduces an attention mechanism into the deep learning text classification model to deal with the classification of Chinese long text sequences. We combine the financial data and management discussion and analysis Chinese text data in the annual reports of 1642 listed companies in China from 2017 to 2020 in the model and compare the effects of the data on different models. The empirical results show that the performance of deep learning models in financial distress prediction overcomes traditional machine learning models. The addition of the attention mechanism improved the effectiveness of the deep learning model in financial distress prediction. Among the models constructed in this study, the Bi-LSTM+Attention model achieves the best performance in financial distress prediction.