Argumentative Patterns as a Costly Signal in Financial Communication and as a Relevant Target of Financial NLP

Communication by actors in the financial markets do more than disclose information and express sentiment. Managers of listed companies in reports and presentations as well as financial analysts in their reports present arguments, i.e. reasons in support of their valuation of a firm (Palmieri et al. 2015, Chen et al. 2021). And these reasons are regularly questioned in dialogical events such as quarterly earnings calls where analysts check their reasoning about the company and occasionally raise objections and challenges to the managers’ arguments. Special events such activist investors campaigns, short seller campaigns, hostile takeover attempt give rise to further focused discussions about valuation, managerial stewardship and governance (Palmieri et al. 2025). Both regular and exceptional circumstances give rise to recurring argumentative patterns in text and dialogue corresponding to the incentives of the participants and the social and regulatory constraints of the situation. These patterns can be described in a relatively content-independent way at the level of the pragmatic moves performed (D’Agostino et al. 2024, Rocci et al. 2024, D’Agostino & Rocci 2024), the logico-inferential structure and their typical linguistic indicators (Lucchini et al. 2025) across moves and countermoves of the participants. In the talk I argue that these patterns, especially those arising from dialogue, represent a relatively costly signal – as per signalling theory in economics (Spence 1973, Palmieri & Rocci 2022) and are therefore much harder to fake than, for instance, mere sentiment words. I also suggest that, being amenable to explicit linguistic description and being hard to fake makes the NLP mining of argumentative patterns at scale a difficult but worthwhile challenge for FinNLP in the pursuit of explainable predictive models for investors and of support systems for managing the financial communications of listed companies. I conclude by presenting work conducted in my group (D’Agostino 2025) on the automatic extraction of question based argumentative patterns in Q&A exchanges in earnings calls.

Andrea Rocci is professor of Linguistics and Argumentation and deputy director of the Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics, and Semiotics at USI Università della Svizzera italiana. He co-directs the Master of European Studies in Investor Relations and Financial Communication (ESIR). He has published extensively in the fields of argumentation, pragmatics, semantics, and discourse analysis. He published a monograph on the relationship between the semantics of modal expressions and argumentation (Modality in Argumentation, Springer 2017) His main applied research focus is the role of argumentation in financial communication.

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