ConvFinQA: Exploring the Chain of Numerical Reasoning in Conversational Finance Question Answering

Zhiyu Chen, Shiyang Li, Charese Smiley, Zhiqiang Ma, Sameena Shah, William Yang Wang


Abstract
With the recent advance in large pre-trained language models, researchers have achieved record performances in NLP tasks that mostly focus on language pattern matching. The community is experiencing the shift of the challenge from how to model language to the imitation of complex reasoning abilities like human beings. In this work, we investigate the application domain of finance that involves real-world, complex numerical reasoning. We propose a new large-scale dataset, ConvFinQA, aiming to study the chain of numerical reasoning in conversational question answering. Our dataset poses great challenge in modeling long-range, complex numerical reasoning paths in real-world conversations. We conduct comprehensive experiments and analyses with both the neural symbolic methods and the prompting-based methods, to provide insights into the reasoning mechanisms of these two divisions. We believe our new dataset should serve as a valuable resource to push forward the exploration of real-world, complex reasoning tasks as the next research focus. Our dataset and code is publicly available at https://github.com/czyssrs/ConvFinQA.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.421
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6279–6292
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.421
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.421
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiyu Chen, Shiyang Li, Charese Smiley, Zhiqiang Ma, Sameena Shah, and William Yang Wang. 2022. ConvFinQA: Exploring the Chain of Numerical Reasoning in Conversational Finance Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6279–6292, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ConvFinQA: Exploring the Chain of Numerical Reasoning in Conversational Finance Question Answering (Chen et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.421.pdf