SoarGraph: Numerical Reasoning over Financial Table-Text Data via Semantic-Oriented Hierarchical Graphs

Abstract

Towards the intelligent understanding of table-text data in the finance domain, previous research explores numerical reasoning over table-text content with Question Answering (QA) tasks. A general framework is to extract supporting evidence from the table and text and then perform numerical reasoning over extracted evidence for inferring the answer. However, existing models are vulnerable to missing supporting evidence, which limits their performance. In this work, we propose a novel Semantic-Oriented Hierarchical Graph (SoarGraph) that models the semantic relationships and dependencies among the different elements (e.g., question, table cells, text paragraphs, quantities, and dates) using hierarchical graphs to facilitate supporting evidence extraction and enhance numerical reasoning capability. We conduct our experiments on two popular benchmarks, FinQA and TAT-QA datasets, and the results show that our SoarGraph significantly outperforms all strong baselines, demonstrating remarkable effectiveness.