ABSTRACT: Accounting language evolves as the transactions and organizations it provides guidance for change. We provide a preliminary analysis of terms used in official accounting pronouncements and annual corporate financial statements. Initial results show statistical natural language-processing techniques provide a means of identifying new terms as they enter the lexicon. These techniques should be valuable in deriving a complete accounting lexicon as well as in constructing and maintaining an accounting thesaurus to support information retrieval.
Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schütze (Stanford University and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999, xxxvii + 680 pp; hardbound, ISBN 0-262-13360-1, $60.00
