Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in Financial NLP: A Comparative Study on Financial Report Analysis

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Main Author: Mohsin, Md Talha
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mohsin, Md Talha
author_facet Mohsin, Md Talha
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support the analysis of complex financial disclosures, yet their reliability, behavioral consistency, and transparency remain insufficiently understood in high-stakes settings. This paper presents a controlled evaluation of five transformer-based LLMs applied to question answering over the Business sections of U.S. 10-K filings. To capture complementary aspects of model behavior, we combine human evaluation, automated similarity metrics, and behavioral diagnostics under standardized and context-controlled prompting conditions. Human assessments indicate that models differ in their average performance across qualitative dimensions such as relevance, completeness, clarity, conciseness, and factual accuracy, though inter-rater agreement is modest, reflecting the subjective nature of these criteria. Automated metrics reveal systematic differences in lexical overlap and semantic similarity across models, while behavioral diagnostics highlight variation in response stability and cross-prompt alignment. Importantly, no single model consistently dominates across all evaluation perspectives. Together, these findings suggest that apparent performance differences should be interpreted as relative tendencies under the tested conditions rather than definitive indicators of general reliability. The results underscore the need for evaluation frameworks that account for human disagreement, behavioral variability, and interpretability when deploying LLMs in financially consequential applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_22936
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in Financial NLP: A Comparative Study on Financial Report Analysis
Mohsin, Md Talha
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Human-Computer Interaction
Computational Finance
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support the analysis of complex financial disclosures, yet their reliability, behavioral consistency, and transparency remain insufficiently understood in high-stakes settings. This paper presents a controlled evaluation of five transformer-based LLMs applied to question answering over the Business sections of U.S. 10-K filings. To capture complementary aspects of model behavior, we combine human evaluation, automated similarity metrics, and behavioral diagnostics under standardized and context-controlled prompting conditions. Human assessments indicate that models differ in their average performance across qualitative dimensions such as relevance, completeness, clarity, conciseness, and factual accuracy, though inter-rater agreement is modest, reflecting the subjective nature of these criteria. Automated metrics reveal systematic differences in lexical overlap and semantic similarity across models, while behavioral diagnostics highlight variation in response stability and cross-prompt alignment. Importantly, no single model consistently dominates across all evaluation perspectives. Together, these findings suggest that apparent performance differences should be interpreted as relative tendencies under the tested conditions rather than definitive indicators of general reliability. The results underscore the need for evaluation frameworks that account for human disagreement, behavioral variability, and interpretability when deploying LLMs in financially consequential applications.
title Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in Financial NLP: A Comparative Study on Financial Report Analysis
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Human-Computer Interaction
Computational Finance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22936