Diagnosing Fine-Grained Inconsistency Classification in Financial Disclosure Text

Aman Kumar, Lasitha Vidyaratne, Dipanjan Dipak Ghosh, Arnab Chakrabarti, Ahmed K. Farahat


Abstract
Financial disclosures may contain numerical, temporal, referential, factual, and policy inconsistencies that require different evidence and reasoning to diagnose. We study fine-grained inconsistency classification: given a passage known to contain a conflict, the goal is to identify its type among 11 categories. Using a fixed snapshot of the synthetic SBID-FD benchmark, we compare frozen and fine-tuned encoders, evidence-augmented classifiers, prompted large language models, and LoRA-adapted generative models under a shared evaluation protocol. Task-specific adaptation yields large improvements over frozen representations, and a fine-tuned 300M encoder performs competitively with substantially larger prompted and adapted models. We further study whether localizing the conflicting claims improves classification through matched predicted-span, reference-span, and distractor-span conditions. The results show that automatically extracted evidence provides additional signal but recovers only part of the benefit obtained from reference spans. Per-class and confusion analyses further reveal that some inconsistency types are especially sensitive to localization quality, whereas others remain difficult even when the relevant evidence is supplied. These findings identify evidence localization and fine-grained type discrimination as distinct challenges and show that compact supervised encoders are strong baselines for this task.
Anthology ID:
2026.finnlp-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Jimin Huang, Yongjae Lee, Sophia Ananiadou, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Hiroya Takamura, Chung-Chi Chen
Venues:
FinNLP | WS
SIG:
SIGFinTech
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
75–90
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.finnlp-1.8/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aman Kumar, Lasitha Vidyaratne, Dipanjan Dipak Ghosh, Arnab Chakrabarti, and Ahmed K. Farahat. 2026. Diagnosing Fine-Grained Inconsistency Classification in Financial Disclosure Text. In Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing, pages 75–90, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Diagnosing Fine-Grained Inconsistency Classification in Financial Disclosure Text (Kumar et al., FinNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.finnlp-1.8.pdf