BizBench: A Quantitative Reasoning Benchmark for Business and Finance

Michael Krumdick, Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, Viet Dac Lai, Varshini Reddy, Charles Lovering, Chris Tanner


Abstract
Answering questions within business and finance requires reasoning, precision, and a wide-breadth of technical knowledge. Together, these requirements make this domain difficult for large language models (LLMs). We introduce BizBench, a benchmark for evaluating models’ ability to reason about realistic financial problems. BizBench comprises eight quantitative reasoning tasks, focusing on question-answering (QA) over financial data via program synthesis. We include three financially-themed code-generation tasks from newly collected and augmented QA data. Additionally, we isolate the reasoning capabilities required for financial QA: reading comprehension of financial text and tables for extracting intermediate values, and understanding financial concepts and formulas needed to calculate complex solutions. Collectively, these tasks evaluate a model’s financial background knowledge, ability to parse financial documents, and capacity to solve problems with code. We conduct an in-depth evaluation of open-source and commercial LLMs, comparing and contrasting the behavior of code-focused and language-focused models. We demonstrate that the current bottleneck in performance is due to LLMs’ limited business and financial understanding, highlighting the value of a challenging benchmark for quantitative reasoning within this domain.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.452
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8309–8332
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.452
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.452
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Krumdick, Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, Viet Dac Lai, Varshini Reddy, Charles Lovering, and Chris Tanner. 2024. BizBench: A Quantitative Reasoning Benchmark for Business and Finance. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8309–8332, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BizBench: A Quantitative Reasoning Benchmark for Business and Finance (Krumdick et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.452.pdf