IDA: An Intelligent Document Analysis System for Evaluating Corporate Governance Practices Based on SEC Required Filings

AbstractThis article presents an intelligent corporate governance analysis and rating system, called IDA System, capable of retrieving SEC required documents of public companies and performing analysis and rating in terms of recommended corporate governance practices. With the techniques of analogical learning, local knowledge bases, databases, and question-dependent semantic networks, the IDA system is able to automatically evaluate the strengths, deficiencies, and risks of a company's corporate governance practices based on the documents stored in the "SEC EDGAR database by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission 2013". A produced score reduces a complex corporate governance process and related policies into a single number which enables concerned government agencies, investors and legislators to assess the governance characteristics of individual companies.