English

FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data

Computation and Language 2022-05-10 v3

Abstract

The sheer volume of financial statements makes it difficult for humans to access and analyze a business's financials. Robust numerical reasoning likewise faces unique challenges in this domain. In this work, we focus on answering deep questions over financial data, aiming to automate the analysis of a large corpus of financial documents. In contrast to existing tasks on general domain, the finance domain includes complex numerical reasoning and understanding of heterogeneous representations. To facilitate analytical progress, we propose a new large-scale dataset, FinQA, with Question-Answering pairs over Financial reports, written by financial experts. We also annotate the gold reasoning programs to ensure full explainability. We further introduce baselines and conduct comprehensive experiments in our dataset. The results demonstrate that popular, large, pre-trained models fall far short of expert humans in acquiring finance knowledge and in complex multi-step numerical reasoning on that knowledge. Our dataset -- the first of its kind -- should therefore enable significant, new community research into complex application domains. The dataset and code are publicly available\url{https://github.com/czyssrs/FinQA}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.00122,
  title  = {FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data},
  author = {Zhiyu Chen and Wenhu Chen and Charese Smiley and Sameena Shah and Iana Borova and Dylan Langdon and Reema Moussa and Matt Beane and Ting-Hao Huang and Bryan Routledge and William Yang Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.00122},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

EMNLP 2021