FNDS: a dialogue-based system for accessing digested financial news

Electronic financial news available on the Internet contains a wealth of information useful for business decision-making. However, as this information is both qualitative and existent in huge volumes, it is very inefficient to digest manually. This paper presents a prototype system called FNDS, which automatically digests financial news by extracting important information from the articles and using this information to fill in pre-defined templates. A unique feature of FNDS is that users can access the extracted information through an interactive dialogue-based interface. This has the advantage that if users do not know exactly what information is required, the system will provide feedback to help them to formulate the information requirement incrementally.