Linguistic features of public sector accounting information disclosed by major cities around the world

An analysis of word and readability

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the linguistic characteristics of public sector accounting information disclosed by the world's major cities. The linguistic information of public sector accounting in annual reports disclosed by cities is analyzed by morphological analysis, TF-IDF, DP, N-gram, FOG index and other based on the analysis of readability indicators, the following results were obtained. First, the analysis of city annual reports revealed that traditionally used accounting technical terms such as assets, earnings, and cash are representative words. Second, a cross-city comparison of key words revealed that different cities emphasize different explanatory items. Third, the level of readability of the cities' annual reports was found to be, on average, that of a third-year college student. This study is the first to reveal the actual status of public accounting language information in annual reports in major cities around the world.