# FinAI Data Assistant: LLM-based Financial Database Query Processing with the OpenAI Function Calling API

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14162/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Financial trading and forecasting agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 16 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Financial trading and forecasting agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/financial-trading-and-forecasting-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15334/) (2023)
- [Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08887/) (2018)
- [BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17564/) (2023)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07820/) (2023)
- [DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11015/) (2023)
- [RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04942/) (2019)
- [CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05378/) (2019)
- [SQLNet: Generating Structured Queries From Natural Language Without Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04436/) (2017)
- [Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12627/) (2020)
- [Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08426/) (2024)
- [SmBoP: Semi-autoregressive Bottom-up Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12412/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Employing Large Language Models for Text-to-SQL Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15186/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Enhanced Text-to-SQL Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06011/) (2024)
- [LLM-Enhanced Black-Litterman Portfolio Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14345/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present FinAI Data Assistant, a practical approach for natural-language querying over financial databases that combines large language models (LLMs) with the OpenAI Function Calling API. Rather than synthesizing complete SQL via text-to-SQL, our system routes user requests to a small library of vetted, parameterized queries, trading generative flexibility for reliability, low latency, and cost efficiency. We empirically study three questions: (RQ1) whether LLMs alone can reliably recall or extrapolate time-dependent financial data without external retrieval; (RQ2) how well LLMs map company names to stock ticker symbols; and (RQ3) whether function calling outperforms text-to-SQL for end-to-end database query processing. Across controlled experiments on prices and fundamentals, LLM-only predictions exhibit non-negligible error and show look-ahead bias primarily for stock prices relative to model knowledge cutoffs. Ticker-mapping accuracy is near-perfect for NASDAQ-100 constituents and high for S&P~500 firms. Finally, FinAI Data Assistant achieves lower latency and cost and higher reliability than a text-to-SQL baseline on our task suite. We discuss design trade-offs, limitations, and avenues for deployment.