Evaluating LLMs' Mathematical Reasoning in Financial Document Question Answering
This addresses the problem of assessing LLMs' capabilities in complex mathematical reasoning for financial professionals, but it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets and methods.
The study evaluated LLMs' mathematical reasoning on financial tabular QA datasets, finding that a novel prompting technique matched or outperformed baselines in performance.
Large Language Models (LLMs), excel in natural language understanding, but their capability for complex mathematical reasoning with an amalgamation of structured tables and unstructured text is uncertain. This study explores LLMs' mathematical reasoning on four financial tabular question-answering datasets: TATQA, FinQA, ConvFinQA, and Multihiertt. Through extensive experiments with various models and prompting techniques, we assess how LLMs adapt to complex tables and mathematical tasks. We focus on sensitivity to table complexity and performance variations with an increasing number of arithmetic reasoning steps. The results provide insights into LLMs' capabilities and limitations in handling complex mathematical scenarios for semi-structured tables. Ultimately, we introduce a novel prompting technique tailored to semi-structured documents, matching or outperforming other baselines in performance while providing a nuanced understanding of LLMs abilities for such a task.