The sheer volume of financial statements makes it difficult for humans to access and analyze a business’s financials. Robust numerical reasoning likewise faces unique challenges in this domain. In this work, we focus on answering deep questions over financial data, aiming to automate the analysis of a large corpus of financial documents. In contrast to existing tasks on general domain, the finance domain includes complex numerical reasoning and understanding of heterogeneous representations. To facilitate analytical progress, we propose a new large-scale dataset, FinQA, with Question-Answering pairs over Financial reports, written by financial experts. We also annotate the gold reasoning programs to ensure full explainability. We further introduce baselines and conduct comprehensive experiments in our dataset. The results demonstrate that popular, large, pre-trained models fall far short of expert humans in acquiring finance knowledge and in complex multi-step numerical reasoning on that knowledge. Our dataset – the first of its kind – should therefore enable significant, new community research into complex application domains. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/czyssrs/FinQA.

This paper presents the two systems we entered into the 2017 E2E NLG Challenge: TemplGen, a templated-based system and SeqGen, a neural network-based system. Through the automatic evaluation, SeqGen achieved competitive results compared to the template-based approach and to other participating systems as well. In addition to the automatic evaluation, in this paper we present and discuss the human evaluation results of our two systems.

We discuss the ethical implications of Natural Language Generation systems. We use one particular system as a case study to identify and classify issues, and we provide an ethics checklist, in the hope that future system designers may benefit from conducting their own ethics reviews based on our checklist.

In this paper, we discuss the results of the IUCL system in the NLI Shared Task 2017. For our system, we explore a variety of phonetic algorithms to generate features for Native Language Identification. These features are contrasted with one of the most successful type of features in NLI, character n-grams. We find that although phonetic features do not perform as well as character n-grams alone, they do increase overall F1 score when used together with character n-grams.