1 Introduction  
2 Evolution Trends: from General to Finance  
2.1 General-domain LMs  
2.2 Financial-domain LMs  
3 Techniques: from FinPLMs to FinLLMs  
3.1 Continual Pre-training  
3.2 Domain-Specific Pre-training from Scratch  
3.3 Mixed-Domain Pre-training  
3.4 Mixed-Domain LLM with Prompt Engineering  
3.5 Instruction Fine-tuned LLM with Prompt Engineering  
4 Evaluation: Benchmark Tasks and Datasets  
4.1 Sentiment Analysis  
4.2 Text Classification  
4.3 Named Entity Recognition  
4.4 Question Answering  
4.5 Stock Movement Prediction  
4.6 Text Summarization  
4.7 Discussion  
5 Advanced Financial NLP Tasks and Datasets  
6 Opportunities and Challenges  
7 Conclusion