Natural Language Processing in Accounting,Auditing and Finance: A Synthesis of the Literature with a Roadmap for Future Research

Natural language processing (NLP) is a part of the artificial intelligence domain focused on communication between humans and computers. NLP attempts to address the inherent problem that while human communications are often ambiguous and imprecise, computers require unambiguous and precise messages to enable understanding. The accounting, auditing and finance domains frequently put forth textual documents intended to communicate a wide variety of messages, including, but not limited to, corporate financial performance, management's assessment of current and future firm performance, analysts’ assessments of firm performance, domain standards and regulations as well as evidence of compliance with relevant standards and regulations. NLP applications have been used to mine these documents to obtain insights, make inferences and to create additional methodologies and artefacts to advance knowledge in accounting, auditing and finance. This paper synthesizes the extant literature in NLP in accounting, auditing and finance to establish the state of current knowledge and to identify paths for future research. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.