# Zero-Shot Question Answering over Financial Documents using Large Language Models Source: [Zero-Shot Question Answering over Financial Documents using Large Language Models]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T02:03:39.970Z Authors: Karmvir Singh Phogat, Chetan Harsha, Sridhar Dasaratha, Shashishekar Ramakrishna, Sai Akhil Puranam Published: 2023-11-19T16:23:34.000Z ## Abstract We introduce a large language model (LLM) based approach to answer complex questions requiring multi-hop numerical reasoning over financial reports. While LLMs have exhibited remarkable performance on various natural language and reasoning tasks, complex reasoning problems often rely on few-shot prompts that require carefully crafted examples. In contrast, our approach uses novel zero-shot prompts that guide the LLM to encode the required reasoning into a Python program or a domain specific language. The generated program is then executed by a program interpreter, thus mitigating the limitations of LLM in performing accurate arithmetic calculations. We evaluate the proposed approach on three financial datasets using some of the recently developed generative pretrained transformer (GPT) models and perform comparisons with various zero-shot baselines. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the accuracy for all the LLMs over their respective baselines. We provide a detailed analysis of the results, generating insights to support our findings. The success of our approach demonstrates the enormous potential to extract complex domain specific numerical reasoning by designing zero-shot prompts to effectively exploit the knowledge embedded in LLMs. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()