AI Engineering · Case study 09

Financial Text Summarization & Insight Generation

Map-reduce summarization for length, RAG for relevance, ROUGE for honesty.

The problem

Analysts read hundreds of pages of annual reports and credit reviews. A full report exceeds any transformer's context window, and summarizing blindly buries the risk disclosures the reader actually opened it for.

The build

Sentence-aware chunking with map-reduce summarization to handle length, and a retrieval-augmented pipeline to answer targeted questions with grounded evidence. Evaluated with ROUGE against reference summaries.

Architecture

— one teal highlight: the retrieval path

What I found

Length and relevance are separate problems and need separate mechanisms. Chunking solves the context window; only retrieval solves 'what are the key risks in this filing'.

The reps

Keeping summaries faithful under map-reduce — where each chunk summary is itself an input — is where the errors compound.

Results

  • ROUGE
    quantitative summary evaluation
  • 2
    paths: summarize + RAG Q&A
  • 50pp → 1
    filing to paragraph digest

What's verified

Every case study carries this block

What was measured, and what was not. Nothing in the second column is estimated into the first.

Measured

The notebook is committed already-executed, with ROUGE scores and charts rendering on GitHub.

Not executed

Evaluated on a sample corpus, not a full filings archive.

Hugging Face TransformersRAGPythonROUGEVector retrieval
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