Fine-tuning Smaller Language Models for Question Answering over Financial Documents

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Phogat, Karmvir Singh, Puranam, Sai Akhil, Dasaratha, Sridhar, Harsha, Chetan, Ramakrishna, Shashishekar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Phogat, Karmvir Singh
Puranam, Sai Akhil
Dasaratha, Sridhar
Harsha, Chetan
Ramakrishna, Shashishekar
author_facet Phogat, Karmvir Singh
Puranam, Sai Akhil
Dasaratha, Sridhar
Harsha, Chetan
Ramakrishna, Shashishekar
contents Recent research has shown that smaller language models can acquire substantial reasoning abilities when fine-tuned with reasoning exemplars crafted by a significantly larger teacher model. We explore this paradigm for the financial domain, focusing on the challenge of answering questions that require multi-hop numerical reasoning over financial texts. We assess the performance of several smaller models that have been fine-tuned to generate programs that encode the required financial reasoning and calculations. Our findings demonstrate that these fine-tuned smaller models approach the performance of the teacher model. To provide a granular analysis of model performance, we propose an approach to investigate the specific student model capabilities that are enhanced by fine-tuning. Our empirical analysis indicates that fine-tuning refines the student models ability to express and apply the required financial concepts along with adapting the entity extraction for the specific data format. In addition, we hypothesize and demonstrate that comparable financial reasoning capability can be induced using relatively smaller datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_12337
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fine-tuning Smaller Language Models for Question Answering over Financial Documents
Phogat, Karmvir Singh
Puranam, Sai Akhil
Dasaratha, Sridhar
Harsha, Chetan
Ramakrishna, Shashishekar
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Recent research has shown that smaller language models can acquire substantial reasoning abilities when fine-tuned with reasoning exemplars crafted by a significantly larger teacher model. We explore this paradigm for the financial domain, focusing on the challenge of answering questions that require multi-hop numerical reasoning over financial texts. We assess the performance of several smaller models that have been fine-tuned to generate programs that encode the required financial reasoning and calculations. Our findings demonstrate that these fine-tuned smaller models approach the performance of the teacher model. To provide a granular analysis of model performance, we propose an approach to investigate the specific student model capabilities that are enhanced by fine-tuning. Our empirical analysis indicates that fine-tuning refines the student models ability to express and apply the required financial concepts along with adapting the entity extraction for the specific data format. In addition, we hypothesize and demonstrate that comparable financial reasoning capability can be induced using relatively smaller datasets.
title Fine-tuning Smaller Language Models for Question Answering over Financial Documents
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12337