We address the detection of emission reduction goals in corporate reports, an important task for monitoring companies’ progress in addressing climate change. Specifically, we focus on the issue of integrating expert feedback in the form of labeled example passages into LLM-based pipelines, and compare the two strategies of (1) a dynamic selection of few-shot examples and (2) the automatic optimization of the prompt by the LLM itself. Our findings on a public dataset of 769 climate-related passages from real-world business reports indicate that automatic prompt optimization is the superior approach, while combining both methods provides only limited benefit. Qualitative results indicate that optimized prompts do indeed capture many intricacies of the targeted emission goal extraction task.

We address the challenge of efficiently extracting structured emission information, specifically emission goals, from company reports. Leveraging the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose a two-stage pipeline that first filters and retrieves potentially relevant passages and then extracts structured information from them using a generative model. We contribute an annotated dataset covering over 14.000 text passages, from which we extracted 739 expert annotated facts. On this dataset, we investigate the accuracy, efficiency and limitations of LLM-based emission information extraction, evaluate different retrieval techniques, and assess efficiency gains for human analysts by using the proposed pipeline. Our research demonstrates the promise of LLM technology in addressing the intricate task of sustainable emission data extraction from company reports.