An Intelligent Text Mining System Applied to SEC Documents

This paper presents an intelligent corporate governance analysis and rating system, called ICGA, capable of retrieving SEC required documents of public companies and performing analysis and rating in terms of recommended corporate governance practices. With local knowledge bases, databases, and semantic networks, ICGA is able to automatically evaluate the strengths, deficiencies, and risks of a company´s corporate governance practices and board of directors based on the documents stored in the SEC EDGAR database. The produced score reduces a complex corporate governance process and related policies into a single number which enables concerned government agencies, investors and legislators to assess the governance characteristics of individual companies.