FinLFQA: Evaluating Attributed Text Generation of LLMs in Financial Long-Form Question Answering
Yitao Long, Tiansheng Hu, Yilun Zhao, Arman Cohan, Chen Zhao
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate to long-form questions, producing plausible yet factually incorrect answers. A common mitigation strategy is to provide attribution to LLM outputs. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on simple attribution that retrieves supporting textual evidence as references. We argue that in real-world scenarios such as financial applications, attribution goes beyond reference retrieval.We introduce FinLFQA, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LLMs to generate long-form answers to complex financial questions with reliable and nuanced attributions. FinLFQA evaluates three critical aspects of attribution through human annotations: (1) supporting evidence extracted from financial reports, (2) intermediate numerical reasoning steps, and (3) domain-specific financial knowledge that informs the reasoning process.We further provide an automatic evaluation framework covering both answer quality and attribution quality. Through extensive experiments on eight LLMs across multiple attribution-generation paradigms, we find that fine-grained metrics are important to distinguish model capabilities, that end-to-end generation achieves comparable performance to post-hoc approaches, and that iterative refinement only helps when guided by external feedback.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.findings-emnlp.908
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Suzhou, China
- Editors:
- Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 16730–16750
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.908/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.908
- Cite (ACL):
- Yitao Long, Tiansheng Hu, Yilun Zhao, Arman Cohan, and Chen Zhao. 2025. FinLFQA: Evaluating Attributed Text Generation of LLMs in Financial Long-Form Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 16730–16750, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- FinLFQA: Evaluating Attributed Text Generation of LLMs in Financial Long-Form Question Answering (Long et al., Findings 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.908.pdf