Sarang at FinCausal 2025: Contextual QA for Financial Causality Detection Combining Extractive and Generative Models

AbstractThis paper describes our approach for the FinCausal 2025 English Shared Task, aimed at detecting and extracting causal relationships from the financial text. The task involved answering context-driven questions to identify causes or effects within specified text segments. Our method utilized a consciousAI RoBERTa-base encoder model, fine-tuned on the SQuADx dataset. We further fine-tuned it using the FinCausal 2025 development set. To enhance the quality and contextual relevance of the answers, we passed outputs from the extractive model through Gemma2-9B, a generative large language model, for answer refinement. This hybrid approach effectively addressed the task’s requirements, showcasing the strength of combining extractive and generative models. We (Team name: Sarang) achieved outstanding results, securing 3rd rank with a Semantic Answer Similarity (SAS) score of 96.74% and an Exact Match (EM) score of 70.14%.