Greenback Bears and Fiscal Hawks: Finance is a Jungle and Text Embeddings Must Adapt

Financial documents are filled with specialized terminology, arcane jargon, and curious acronyms that pose challenges for general-purpose text embeddings. Yet, few text embeddings specialized for finance have been reported in the literature, perhaps in part due to a lack of public datasets and benchmarks. We present BAM embeddings, a set of text embeddings finetuned on a carefully constructed dataset of 14.3M query-passage pairs. Demonstrating the benefits of domain-specific training, BAM embeddings achieve Recall@1 of 62.8% on a held-out test set, vs. only 39.2% for the best general-purpose text embedding from OpenAI. Further, BAM embeddings increase question answering accuracy by 8% on FinanceBench and show increased sensitivity to the finance-specific elements that are found in detailed, forward-looking and company and date-specific queries. To support further research we describe our approach in detail, quantify the importance of hard negative mining and dataset scale.

On Learning a Hidden Directed Graph with Path Queries

In this paper, we consider the problem of reconstructing a directed graph using path queries. In this query model of learning, a graph is hidden from the learner, and the learner can access information about it with path queries. For a source and destination node, a path query returns whether there is a directed path from the source to the destination node in the hidden graph. In this paper we first give bounds for learning graphs on $n$ vertices and $k$ strongly connected components. We then study the case of bounded degree directed trees and give new algorithms for learning "almost-trees" -- directed trees to which extra edges have been added. We also give some lower bound constructions justifying our approach.