Adapt LLM for Multi-turn Reasoning QA using Tidy Data

Jan Strich


Abstract
This paper presents our submission to the Fin-DBQA shared task at the 9th FinNLP workshop. The task involves answering finance-focused questions in a multi-turn environment, requiring step-by-step reasoning and Python code generation. We propose a novel approach to tackle this multidimensional problem by pre-processing the data into tidy data format so that each column represents a variable and each row an observation. Our experiments demonstrate that using the tidy data format allows all models to surpass SOTA, with GPT-4o achieving a 50.62% accuracy on the DBQR-QA benchmark achieving second place on the shared task leaderboard. These findings suggest that transforming data into the tidy data format enhances reasoning capabilities, reduces syntax errors, and improves performance on table-reasoning QA tasks. The code is available online.
Anthology ID:
2025.finnlp-1.45
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:
392–400
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.finnlp-1.45/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jan Strich. 2025. Adapt LLM for Multi-turn Reasoning QA using Tidy Data. 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 392–400, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Adapt LLM for Multi-turn Reasoning QA using Tidy Data (Strich, FinNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.finnlp-1.45.pdf