Complaint and Severity Identification From Online Financial Content

Abstract

The automatic detection of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">financial complaints</i> ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">FINCORP</i> ) can benefit businesses and online merchants. Compared with manually tagged complaints, they can use this information to monitor and address issues and effectively route them to appropriate teams. This can also promote greater transparency and accountability when dealing with consumer financial products and services, strengthening the firm’s brand value. In linguistic studies, complaints have been classified into severity categories based on the level of risk the complainant is prepared to accept. Furthermore, since emotions influence every speech act, an individual’s emotional state considerably impacts the complaint expression. In this article, we introduce a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">FINCORP</i> resource, a collection of annotated complaints arising between financial institutions and consumers expressed in English on Twitter. The dataset has been enriched with the associated emotion, sentiment, and complaint severity classes. The dataset comprises 3149 complaint and 3133 noncomplaint instances spanning over ten domains (e.g., credit cards, mortgages). For a comprehensive evaluation of our dataset, we develop a multitask framework for complaint detection and severity classification with emotion recognition (ER) and sentiment classification as the additional tasks and compare it with several existing baselines. The corpus and code are available here: https://github.com/RohanBh23/FINCORP.