FinGEAR: Financial Mapping-Guided Enhanced Answer Retrieval
This addresses retrieval challenges for financial analysts using complex documents, offering incremental improvements over existing RAG methods.
The paper tackled the problem of retrieving answers from lengthy financial disclosures like 10-K filings, where standard retrieval methods underperform, and introduced FinGEAR, a tailored framework that improved F1 by up to 56.7% over flat RAG and 217.6% over prior tree-based systems.
Financial disclosures such as 10-K filings present challenging retrieval problems due to their length, regulatory section hierarchy, and domain-specific language, which standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models underuse. We introduce FinGEAR (Financial Mapping-Guided Enhanced Answer Retrieval), a retrieval framework tailored to financial documents. FinGEAR combines a finance lexicon for Item-level guidance (FLAM), dual hierarchical indices for within-Item search (Summary Tree and Question Tree), and a two-stage cross-encoder reranker. This design aligns retrieval with disclosure structure and terminology, enabling fine-grained, query-aware context selection. Evaluated on full 10-Ks with queries aligned to the FinQA dataset, FinGEAR delivers consistent gains in precision, recall, F1, and relevancy, improving F1 by up to 56.7% over flat RAG, 12.5% over graph-based RAGs, and 217.6% over prior tree-based systems, while also increasing downstream answer accuracy with a fixed reader. By jointly modeling section hierarchy and domain lexicon signals, FinGEAR improves retrieval fidelity and provides a practical foundation for high-stakes financial analysis.