Retrieval-Augmented Chain-of-Thought in Semi-structured Domains
This addresses the problem of domain-specific QA for legal and financial applications, offering an incremental improvement by integrating retrieval with existing LLM capabilities.
The study tackled the challenge of applying question answering systems to specialized domains like law and finance by leveraging the semi-structured nature of data to retrieve relevant context, enabling large language models to handle long inputs; the resulting system outperformed contemporary models and provided useful explanations.
Applying existing question answering (QA) systems to specialized domains like law and finance presents challenges that necessitate domain expertise. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive language comprehension and in-context learning capabilities, their inability to handle very long inputs/contexts is well known. Tasks specific to these domains need significant background knowledge, leading to contexts that can often exceed the maximum length that existing LLMs can process. This study explores leveraging the semi-structured nature of legal and financial data to efficiently retrieve relevant context, enabling the use of LLMs for domain-specialized QA. The resulting system outperforms contemporary models and also provides useful explanations for the answers, encouraging the integration of LLMs into legal and financial NLP systems for future research.