This Week in XBRL: Eyes on the Future

In a continued effort to educate on the development of XBRL technology in industries such as financial services (and beyond), Merrill Corporation will share articles and columns published on the topic.

On our Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, we put out a question: “What do you see in store for the future of XBRL?”

Admittedly, tagging systems for financial reporting may not be the most obvious subject for abstract thought, but over the past decade, we have already seen XBRL being adopted for any number of unusual uses. In theory, XBRL tags could be used for any software-based financial purpose:

Now, MarketBrief, a new start-up based in Mountain View, California, promises to publish over 1000 stories per day thanks to its software journalists.

It's easier than it sounds. SEC filings are published in a format called XBRL, or eXtensible Business Reporting Language, much like websites are published in HTML. MarketBrief's software generates articles by extracting key facts from the XBRL data and slotting them into pre-defined sentences.

This NewScientist.com article points out that the only real downside to this reporting software is the lack of humanity. “The result is readable, if dull,” says reporter Jacob Aron, “but MarketBrief will beat a human journalist to the punch every time, as the company claims it takes just three to 20 seconds for it to break a story.” If MarketBrief can iron out the dryness of their ‘software journalists,’ the site could easily become a go-to location for financial news, and that reality isn’t far off.

We cannot say whether or not MarketBrief is making the effort to remove the computer-generated tone of their reporting, but other software clearly is. AI “chatterbots,” like Cleverbot and Jabberwacky use complex algorithms to read and respond to live discussion from human participants. As time passes, the artificial intelligence gets smarter, learning more and more of the eccentricities that differentiate humans from computers. In fact, Cleverbot recently scored a 59.3% success rate on the Turing Test, a method of determining whether or not a speaker is human or software. That means that the majority of people having a chat session with Cleverbot could not tell that they were speaking with a computer.

Will Fortune Magazine replace their reporters with web-crawling software? Maybe, eventually, but we would suggest still picking up the phone if they call.

Do you have thoughts on the future of XBRL in the upcoming decades, share them below.

----- 

Merrill Corporation is proud to offer XBRL Complete, a suite of services that meets - and has options to exceed – the mandated requirements for XBRL for mutual funds. For more information, please click here or call 866-367-9110.