Grounded Event Extraction from SEC 8-K Filings with a Fine-Grained Taxonomy
Breaking down vague SEC filings into specific, verifiable business events
Researchers built a system that reads SEC 8-K filings — the documents companies must file when something important happens — and sorts them into 119 specific event types instead of the SEC's broad categories. The system anchors each classification to exact quotes from the filing and assigns quality scores; tags with the highest scores reach 96% accuracy, while unsupported ones drop to near zero. Applied to nearly 300,000 filings, the system shows that events lumped together by the SEC actually move stock prices differently.
Investors and regulators currently rely on coarse SEC categories that mix routine announcements with major news, making it hard to spot what actually matters. This fine-grained breakdown lets market participants and researchers identify economically significant events consistently and verify that the classification is correct by checking the source text. The dataset of 601,000 grounded event tags provides a foundation for better market analysis and compliance monitoring.