# A Numerical Reasoning Question Answering System with Fine-grained Retriever and the Ensemble of Multiple Generators for FinQA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08506 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08506/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13319/) (2019)
- [FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00122/) (2021)
- [TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02349/) (2020)
- [GraPPa: Grammar-Augmented Pre-Training for Table Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13845/) (2020)
- [TUTA: Tree-based Transformers for Generally Structured Table Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12537/) (2020)
- [TableFormer: Robust Transformer Modeling for Table-Text Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00274/) (2022)
- [Ape210K: A Large-Scale and Template-Rich Dataset of Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11506/) (2020)
- [TURL: Table Understanding through Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14806/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Can GPT models be Financial Analysts? An Evaluation of ChatGPT and GPT-4 on mock CFA Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08678/) (2023)
- [APOLLO: An Optimized Training Approach for Long-form Numerical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07249/) (2022)
- [Program of Thoughts for Financial Reasoning: Leveraging Dynamic In-Context Examples and Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13157/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The numerical reasoning in the financial domain -- performing quantitative analysis and summarizing the information from financial reports -- can greatly increase business efficiency and reduce costs of billions of dollars. Here, we propose a numerical reasoning question answering system to answer numerical reasoning questions among financial text and table data sources, consisting of a retriever module, a generator module, and an ensemble module. Specifically, in the retriever module, in addition to retrieving the whole row data, we innovatively design a cell retriever that retrieves the gold cells to avoid bringing unrelated and similar cells in the same row to the inputs of the generator module. In the generator module, we utilize multiple generators to produce programs, which are operation steps to answer the question. Finally, in the ensemble module, we integrate multiple programs to choose the best program as the output of our system. In the final private test set in FinQA Competition, our system obtains 69.79 execution accuracy.