Auditing Strategic-Renewal Disclosure in SEC 10-K Reports: A Traceable Text-Analytic Framework

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Zixuan Yin
Beijing University of Financial Technology, Beijing, China

DOI: https://doi.org/10.70267/icrafm.202617786793

Keywords

content analysis, corporate annual reports, SEC 10-K, strategic renewal disclosure, text analysis

Abstract

An SEC 10-K often places discussion of new markets, capabilities, and business scope beside routine growth and accounting language. We constructed a traceable audit for the strategic-renewal signal in those disclosures. It combines a theory-guided vocabulary, a sentence-level context screen, and exact-passage repetition adjustment, while retaining the source passages used in every filing score. The corpus comprises 1,663 filings from 1,530 companies in the 2018–2020 source test partitions of EDGAR-CORPUS. We drew 320 passages for a company-disjoint audit, including 120 length-matched renewal–growth pairs, and had a blinded language model code them. Context screening increased precision from 0.2333 to 0.2714 but reduced recall from 0.5600 to 0.3800. The resulting F1 was 0.3167, below the dictionary trigger’s 0.3294. Renewal-cue passages exceeded growth-only passages by 0.0750 in concrete-initiative proportion, yet the 95% bootstrap interval, [-0.0250, 0.1833], included zero. The evidence points to a rule-design trade-off, not classifier superiority or a verified renewal measure. Component and parameter checks identify the filing scores most affected by processing choices. Pending independent expert coding and verified organizational events, the scores are exploratory disclosure signals.

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Published
Oct 19, 2026
Conference Proceedings Volume
Vol. 17 (2026): Proceedings of the International Conference on Research in Accounting, Finance and Management (ICRAFM 2026)
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How to Cite

Yin, Zixuan. “Auditing Strategic-Renewal Disclosure in SEC 10-K Reports: A Traceable Text-Analytic Framework”. Exploring Science Academic Conference Series, vol. 17, Oct. 2026, pp. 786-93, https://doi.org/10.70267/icrafm.202617786793.