In A Lecture Organized by UoB’s College of Business Administration American Professor: Modern Technology Leads to Better Understanding and Analysis of Corporate Reports

Sakhir – University of Bahrain (Khadija Abdulsalam)
16 June 2022
“The text analysis tool has recently become widely used by both researchers and practitioners, as it is used to determine the complexity of reading and understanding a document, the tone of the document, whether positive or negative, how widespread this tone is throughout the document, and the messages it conveys to readers.” Professor Emeritus of Accounting and Information Systems at the College of Business of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA, Dr. Rajendra Srivastava, stated.
Moreover, he noted that recent developments in information technology in terms of text mining tools, and search engines such as Google, are not only changing the way we collect information and conduct research, but also change the types of questions researchers ask and answer. In addition to these technological advances, the programming skill of individual researchers also makes a difference in terms of how and what kind of information one can collect, however, developing individual programming expertise is time consuming and a waste of time and resources, especially when smart search engines are available.
This came in a lecture recently organized by the Accounting Department of the College of Business Administration at the University of Bahrain (UoB) entitled “Textual Analysis of Corporate Reports: What Can We Learn?”, attended by more than 50 participants from students of scientific research courses, from the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs, as well as faculty members, and those interested in the field of scientific research.
The seminar was opened by the Head of the Department, Dr. Abdullah Khaled Al-Jalahma, welcoming the main speaker, Dr. Srivastava, holder of a PhD in Accounting from the University of Oklahoma, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Oregon State University in the United States, noting that this lecture is a continuation of building bridges of communication with everything new in the world of accounting, as it is one of the most important pillars of institutions and businesses.
Also, in the lecture moderated through MS Teams, Associate Professor in the Department of Accounting, Dr. Gagan Kukerja, Dr. Srivastava focused on clarifying the concepts related to analytic geometry applied to textual analysis, giving the example that “cosine similarity” is used to determine how similar two documents are, or to learn how to classify groups Peers and competitors, or to find candidates for mergers and acquisitions, based on descriptions of product attributes, as well as an assessment of different business risks.
Furthermore, Dr. Srivastava presented the SeekiNF smart search engine, which was developed at the University of Kansas School of Business, and is a cloud-based technology that provides a wide range of tools, to collect financial and non-financial information from company files, to perform textual analysis with its built-in features such as word and sentence count, word distribution and variety, six reading indicators, and measures of risk sentiment, such as financial, tax, subjective and total risk, cosine measure of similarity, measure of vector similarity, in addition to developing analytical predictive models to assess risk.
It is worth noting that Dr. Srivastava has published more than 110 academic articles, and received the 2017 Notable Contribution to the Accounting Information Systems Literature Award from the American Accounting Association.

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