Revealing Insights: Sentiment Analysis of Indian Annual Reports

Annual reports are the corporate documents companies publish every year. These documents contain crucial company performance information and are often analyzed manually and objectively. The Investor often ignores the annual report’s qualitative data and focuses only on quantitative data. In literature, it has been demonstrated that managers’ word choices, CSR initiatives, and sentiments expressed in annual reports are related to future stock returns, earnings, and management fraud. Therefore, the study aims to observe sentiment orientation in CEO letters, Management Discussion and Analysis(MD&A), and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and examine the sentiment relation with company performance. The NSE-listed company annual reports are considered for the study. In the proposed approach, the results of the LM Dictionary-Based technique, Naive Bayes, SVM, RF, LSTM, and FinBERT model are considered to determine the final sentiment. The annual report tone is calculated and compared with the performance indicators, i.e., Return on Assets(ROA) and Return on Equity(ROE).