FinCARDS: Card-Based Analyst Reranking for Financial Document Question Answering

Yixi Zhou, Fan Zhang, YU Chen, Haipeng Zhang, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie


Abstract
Financial question answering (QA) over long corporate filings requires evidence to satisfy strict constraints on entities, financial metrics, fiscal periods, and numeric values. However, existing LLM-based rerankers primarily optimize semantic relevance, leading to unstable rankings and opaque decisions on long documents. We propose FINCARDS, a structured reranking framework that reframes financial evidence selection as constraint satisfaction under a finance-aware schema. FINCARDS represents filing chunks and questions using aligned schema fields (entities, metrics, periods, and numeric spans), enabling deterministic field-level matching. Evidence is selected via a multi-stage tournament reranking with stability-aware aggregation, producing auditable decision traces. Across two corporate filing QA benchmarks, FINCARDS substantially improves early-rank retrieval over both lexical and LLM-based reranking baselines, while reducing ranking variance, without requiring model fine-tuning or unpredictable inference budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/XanderZhou2022/FINCARDS.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1244
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
24836–24852
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1244/
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Cite (ACL):
Yixi Zhou, Fan Zhang, YU Chen, Haipeng Zhang, Preslav Nakov, and Zhuohan Xie. 2026. FinCARDS: Card-Based Analyst Reranking for Financial Document Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 24836–24852, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FinCARDS: Card-Based Analyst Reranking for Financial Document Question Answering (Zhou et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1244.pdf
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