How’s Business Going Worldwide ? A Multilingual Annotated Corpus for Business Relation Extraction

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 3696–3705 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 3696 How’s Business Going Worldwide ? A Multilingual Annotated Corpus for Business Relation Extraction Hadjer Khaldi1,2, Farah Benamara1, Camille Pradel2, Gr´egoire Sigel2, Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles1 1IRIT, Universit´e de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse INP, UT3, Toulouse, France, 2 Geotrend, Toulouse, France {farah.benamara, nathalie.aussenac-gilles}@irit.fr, {Hadjer, Camille, Gr´egoire }@geotrend.fr Abstract The business world has changed due to the 21st century economy, where borders have melted and trades became free. Nowadays, competition is no longer only at the local market level but also at the global level. In this context, the World Wide Web has become a major source of information for companies and professionals to keep track of their complex, rapidly changing, and competitive business environment. A lot of effort is nonetheless needed to collect and analyze this information due to information overload problem and the huge number of web pages to process and analyze. In this paper, we propose the BIZREL resource, the first multilingual (French, English, Spanish, and Chinese) dataset for automatic extraction of binary business relations involving organizations from the web. This dataset is used to train several monolingual and cross-lingual deep learning models to detect these relations in texts. Our results are encouraging, demonstrating the effectiveness of such a resource for both research and business communities. In particular, we believe multilingual business relation extraction systems are crucial tools for decision makers to identify links between specific market stakeholders and build business networks which enable to anticipate changes and discover new threats or opportunities. Our work is therefore an important direction toward such tools. Keywords: Business relations, Multilingual linguistic resources, Relation extraction. 1. Introduction The 21st century economy has shaped the economic landscape and changed the way market stakeholders interact with each other in the global market where national borders have melted and trades became more open and free, leading therefore to a more competitive business world (Hameed et al., 2021). Indeed, com- petitors of one firm are no longer limited to firms of the same country or region, rivalry has moved from the local market level to the multinational level (Gorod- nichenko et al., 2008), inciting companies and indus- tries to reinforce their capacity of innovation in order to deliver competitive products and services, expand their economic growth, and improve economic perfor- mances (Passaris, 2006; Hameed et al., 2021). In this context, the available business and financial tex- tual information on the internet (e.g., companies an- nouncements, industry research reports, online news articles, and policy statements) has become a major source of information for companies and profession- als to keep track of their complex, rapidly changing, and competitive business environment (Sewlal, 2004). For years, English has been considered as the interna- tional lingua franca to communicate on the web in dif- ferent formats (Dor, 2004). However, in order to en- hance customers experience and expand the regional and global market presence, multilingual contents have …

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