Enhancing Business Analytics through Hybrid Summarization of Financial Reports
About
Financial reports and earnings communications contain large volumes of structured and semi structured information, making detailed manual analysis inefficient. Earnings conference calls provide valuable evidence about a firm's performance, outlook, and strategic priorities. The manual analysis of lengthy call transcripts requires substantial effort and is susceptible to interpretive bias and unintentional error. In this work, we present a hybrid summarization framework that combines extractive and abstractive techniques to produce concise and factually reliable Reuters-style summaries from the ECTSum dataset. The proposed two stage pipeline first applies the LexRank algorithm to identify salient sentences, which are subsequently summarized using fine-tuned variants of BART and PEGASUS designed for resource constrained settings. In parallel, we fine-tune a Longformer Encoder-Decoder (LED) model to directly capture long-range contextual dependencies in financial documents. Model performance is evaluated using standard automatic metrics, including ROUGE, METEOR, MoverScore, and BERTScore, along with domain-specific variants such as SciBERTScore and FinBERTScore. To assess factual accuracy, we further employ entity-level measures based on source-precision and F1-target. The results highlight complementary trade offs between approaches, long context models yield the strongest overall performance, while the hybrid framework achieves competitive results with improved factual consistency under computational constraints. These findings support the development of practical summarization systems for efficiently distilling lengthy financial texts into usable business insights.