The project is a comprehensive analysis of the form, content and impact of communications between large, publicly traded corporations and their key stakeholder groups concerning the following three key aspects of corporate governance: i) compliance with governance requirements and recommendations (e.g. The Combined Code in the UK); ii) executive remuneration; and iii) senior management turnover.
Mahmoud is a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University. His main research interests are natural language processing, corpus linguistics, information extraction, machine learning and computational linguistics. In his research he worked with multidisciplinary multilingual big data including financial narratives, news articles, medical journals, and data from social science and humanities. Mahmoud is also working with the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University on a project funded by UCREL working on VardSourcing and SenseSourcing – the use of crowdsourcing to build lexicons and check spelling variation in historical data.
Recent publications and presentations related to this project include:
El-Haj, M., Rayson, P., Young, S., and Walker, M.. “Detecting Document Structure in a Very Large Corpus of UK Financial Reports”. In The 9th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 26-31 May 2014, Reykjavik, Iceland. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/El-HajEtAl_lrec14.pdf
Athanasakou, V., El-Haj, M., Rayson, P., Young, S., and Walker, M.. “Computer-based Analysis of the Strategic Content of UK Annual Report Narratives”. In American Accounting Association Annual Meeting, August 2-6, 2014, Atlanta, USA. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/AthanasakouEtAl_AAA_outline.pdf
IR Group Glasgow University, 2015 / School of Computing Science: Analysing UK Annual Report Narratives using Text Analysis and Natural Language Processing, Glasgow, Scotland. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/elhaj/docs/GlasgowTalk.pdf
Bangor University: PhD Training Session at Bangor Business School: Analysing Annual Report Narratives (co presented with Steve Young, LUMS, Lancaster University), 2014, Bangor, Wales. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/elhaj/docs/bangorSlides.pdf
The 8th LSE/LUMS/MBS Conference 2014 / London School of Economics: Natural Language Processing of UK Annual Report Narratives (co presented with Paul Rayson, SCC, Lancaster University), London, England. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/elhaj/docs/RaysonElHaj.pdf