Enhancing Causal Relationship Detection Using Prompt Engineering and Large Language Models

Pulkit Chatwal, Amit Agarwal, Ankush Mittal


Abstract
This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) and prompt engineering to detect causal relationships in financial disclosures. The task was part of the FinCausal 2025 shared competition, which focuses on identifying cause-and-effect relationships in financial texts across languages. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of LLMs, specifically LLaMA 3.2, in tackling causality detection in English and Spanish financial reports. The paper introduces various prompt engineering techniques, including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, to improve performance. For English, the best results were achieved using the Few-Shot + CoT approach, while for Spanish, the Few-Shot method provided strong semantic alignment despite lower exact match accuracy. The evaluation used two metrics: Exact Match (EM) and Semantic Alignment Score (SAS). The results showed high SAS scores for both languages, indicating good semantic understanding, with English performing particularly well. The study emphasizes the importance of tailored prompt engineering techniques to handle language-specific nuances in financial contexts and suggests future research directions, including fine-tuning LLaMA 3.2 and testing additional LLM architectures to enhance multilingual causality detection in financial texts.
Anthology ID:
2025.finnlp-1.26
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop of the 9th Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP), the 6th Financial Narrative Processing (FNP), and the 1st Workshop on Large Language Models for Finance and Legal (LLMFinLegal)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Chung-Chi Chen, Antonio Moreno-Sandoval, Jimin Huang, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Venues:
FinNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
248–252
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.finnlp-1.26/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pulkit Chatwal, Amit Agarwal, and Ankush Mittal. 2025. Enhancing Causal Relationship Detection Using Prompt Engineering and Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop of the 9th Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP), the 6th Financial Narrative Processing (FNP), and the 1st Workshop on Large Language Models for Finance and Legal (LLMFinLegal), pages 248–252, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Causal Relationship Detection Using Prompt Engineering and Large Language Models (Chatwal et al., FinNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.finnlp-1.26.pdf