LeedsMEng26: Qwen + Gemini for FinCausal 2026 Causality Detection in Financial Narrative Texts

Zaid Shahrouri, Ayomide Ivienagbor, Idrees Asad, Rijul Shrestha, Yasemin Bal, Zahaab Nadeem


Abstract
This paper presents the LeedsMEng26 system for the FinCausal 2026 shared task (CITATION) on financial causality detection in narrative texts. The task is formulated as extractive question answering over English and Spanish financial reports, where systems must return a verbatim span from the context that answers an abstractive question about a cause or an effect. We propose a two-stage pipeline consisting of candidate span generation followed by span verification and boundary refinement under a strict extractiveness constraint. We evaluate both an extractive RoBERTa-based baseline and instruction-tuned large language models. Results show that Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct is a stronger candidate generator than the RoBERTa baseline, and that a second-stage verifier further improves answer boundary accuracy and overall adequacy. Our best configuration, Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct with Gemini-2.5-flash refinement, achieved an adequacy score of 4.7000 for English and 4.6143 for Spanish. These findings suggest that a modular generation-and-verification pipeline is effective for extractive financial causality detection.
Anthology ID:
2026.fnp-1.17
Volume:
The 7th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Mo El-Haj, Antonio Moreno Sandoval, Ana Garcia-Serrano, Chung-Chi Chen, Paul Rayson, Yanco Amor Torterolo Orta, Paloma Martinez, Jordi Porta
Venues:
FNP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
160–168
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-fnp-17
DOI:
10.63317/4aaj7cwvpjxy
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zaid Shahrouri, Ayomide Ivienagbor, Idrees Asad, Rijul Shrestha, Yasemin Bal, and Zahaab Nadeem. 2026. LeedsMEng26: Qwen + Gemini for FinCausal 2026 Causality Detection in Financial Narrative Texts. In The 7th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop, pages 160–168, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
LeedsMEng26: Qwen + Gemini for FinCausal 2026 Causality Detection in Financial Narrative Texts (Shahrouri et al., FNP 2026)
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