@inproceedings{zou-etal-2026-fin,
title = "Fin-{STAR}: Structure-as-Semantics to Resolve Implicitness in Financial Retrieval",
author = "Zou, Yu and
Chen, Yan and
He, Lida and
Zhou, Qi and
Zhou, Xiaorui and
Zhong, Aixi and
Wang, Yi and
Li, Wei and
Wang, Qingyu and
Li, Jiatao and
Gong, Wei and
Zeng, Jialei and
Zhao, Jingmei and
Jiang, Ke and
Li, Qing",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.2151/",
pages = "43334--43347",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "Understanding financial documents is critical for high-stakes decision-making yet hindered by systemic semantic implicitness: key facts are rarely explicit in surface text and often determined by global structural cues. Missing these cues invites semantic misinterpretations, such as misreading what a number refers to, an outcome unacceptable in high-stakes environments. However, existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically treat structure as a physical navigational skeleton rather than intrinsic semantic knowledge. To address this, we introduce Fin-STAR (Financial STructure-As-Semantics Retrieval), a framework redefining hierarchy as intrinsic semantics. Fin-STAR incorporates a novel Structure-Enriched Semantic Indexing mechanism that augments the hierarchical lineage with snippet-derived virtual nodes, and injects this enriched context via a semantic cross-attention paradigm, rendering implicit cues explicit. By grounding evidence within its structural scope, we preserve factual invariance and ensure contextual integrity. Addressing the lack of granular public datasets, we conduct experiments on FinTierQA Gold, a curated expert benchmark. Results show that Fin-STAR outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical and graph-based baselines across diverse query complexities, document types, and markets. Notably, ablations confirm that our semantic injection consistently outperforms alternative strategies. Finally, we release FinTierQA, comprising 3.9M pairs automatically constructed from 78k documents via our framework ."
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<abstract>Understanding financial documents is critical for high-stakes decision-making yet hindered by systemic semantic implicitness: key facts are rarely explicit in surface text and often determined by global structural cues. Missing these cues invites semantic misinterpretations, such as misreading what a number refers to, an outcome unacceptable in high-stakes environments. However, existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically treat structure as a physical navigational skeleton rather than intrinsic semantic knowledge. To address this, we introduce Fin-STAR (Financial STructure-As-Semantics Retrieval), a framework redefining hierarchy as intrinsic semantics. Fin-STAR incorporates a novel Structure-Enriched Semantic Indexing mechanism that augments the hierarchical lineage with snippet-derived virtual nodes, and injects this enriched context via a semantic cross-attention paradigm, rendering implicit cues explicit. By grounding evidence within its structural scope, we preserve factual invariance and ensure contextual integrity. Addressing the lack of granular public datasets, we conduct experiments on FinTierQA Gold, a curated expert benchmark. Results show that Fin-STAR outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical and graph-based baselines across diverse query complexities, document types, and markets. Notably, ablations confirm that our semantic injection consistently outperforms alternative strategies. Finally, we release FinTierQA, comprising 3.9M pairs automatically constructed from 78k documents via our framework .</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Fin-STAR: Structure-as-Semantics to Resolve Implicitness in Financial Retrieval
%A Zou, Yu
%A Chen, Yan
%A He, Lida
%A Zhou, Qi
%A Zhou, Xiaorui
%A Zhong, Aixi
%A Wang, Yi
%A Li, Wei
%A Wang, Qingyu
%A Li, Jiatao
%A Gong, Wei
%A Zeng, Jialei
%A Zhao, Jingmei
%A Jiang, Ke
%A Li, Qing
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F zou-etal-2026-fin
%X Understanding financial documents is critical for high-stakes decision-making yet hindered by systemic semantic implicitness: key facts are rarely explicit in surface text and often determined by global structural cues. Missing these cues invites semantic misinterpretations, such as misreading what a number refers to, an outcome unacceptable in high-stakes environments. However, existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically treat structure as a physical navigational skeleton rather than intrinsic semantic knowledge. To address this, we introduce Fin-STAR (Financial STructure-As-Semantics Retrieval), a framework redefining hierarchy as intrinsic semantics. Fin-STAR incorporates a novel Structure-Enriched Semantic Indexing mechanism that augments the hierarchical lineage with snippet-derived virtual nodes, and injects this enriched context via a semantic cross-attention paradigm, rendering implicit cues explicit. By grounding evidence within its structural scope, we preserve factual invariance and ensure contextual integrity. Addressing the lack of granular public datasets, we conduct experiments on FinTierQA Gold, a curated expert benchmark. Results show that Fin-STAR outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical and graph-based baselines across diverse query complexities, document types, and markets. Notably, ablations confirm that our semantic injection consistently outperforms alternative strategies. Finally, we release FinTierQA, comprising 3.9M pairs automatically constructed from 78k documents via our framework .
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.2151/
%P 43334-43347
Markdown (Informal)
[Fin-STAR: Structure-as-Semantics to Resolve Implicitness in Financial Retrieval](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.2151/) (Zou et al., Findings 2026)
ACL
- Yu Zou, Yan Chen, Lida He, Qi Zhou, Xiaorui Zhou, Aixi Zhong, Yi Wang, Wei Li, Qingyu Wang, Jiatao Li, Wei Gong, Jialei Zeng, Jingmei Zhao, Ke Jiang, and Qing Li. 2026. Fin-STAR: Structure-as-Semantics to Resolve Implicitness in Financial Retrieval. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 43334–43347, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.