Promises made by politicians, corporate leaders, and public figures have a significant impact on public perception, trust, and institutional reputation. However, the complexity and volume of such commitments, coupled with difficulties in verifying their fulfillment, necessitate innovative methods for assessing their credibility. This paper introduces the concept of Promise Verification, a systematic approach involving steps such as promise identification, evidence assessment, and the evaluation of timing for verification. We propose the first multilingual dataset, ML-Promise, which includes English, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, aimed at facilitating in-depth verification of promises, particularly in the context of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports. Given the growing emphasis on corporate environmental contributions, this dataset addresses the challenge of evaluating corporate promises, especially in light of practices like greenwashing. Our findings also explore textual and image-based baselines, with promising results from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches. This work aims to foster further discourse on the accountability of public commitments across multiple languages and domains.

While extensive research exists on misinformation and disinformation, there is limited focus on future-oriented commitments, such as corporate ESG promises, which are often difficult to verify yet significantly impact public trust and market stability. To address this gap, we introduce the task of promise verification, leveraging natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automatically detect ESG commitments, identify supporting evidence, and evaluate the consistency between promises and evidence, while also inferring potential verification time points. This paper presents the dataset used in SemEval-2025 PromiseEval, outlines participant solutions, and discusses key findings. The goal is to enhance transparency in corporate discourse, strengthen investor trust, and support regulators in monitoring the fulfillment of corporate commitments.

To accurately assess the dynamic impact of a company’s activities on its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores, we have initiated a series of shared tasks, named ML-ESG. These tasks adhere to the MSCI guidelines for annotating news articles across various languages. This paper details the third iteration of our series, ML-ESG-3, with a focus on impact duration inference—a task that poses significant challenges in estimating the enduring influence of events, even for human analysts. In ML-ESG-3, we provide datasets in five languages (Chinese, English, French, Korean, and Japanese) and share insights from our experience in compiling such subjective datasets. Additionally, this paper reviews the methodologies proposed by ML-ESG-3 participants and offers a comparative analysis of the models’ performances. Concluding the paper, we introduce the concept for the forthcoming series of shared tasks, namely multi-lingual ESG promise verification, and discuss its potential contributions to the field.

Text feedback from urban scenes is a crucial tool for pedestrians to understand surroundings, obstacles, and safe pathways. However, existing image captioning datasets often concentrate on the overall image description and lack detailed scene descriptions, overlooking features for pedestrians walking on urban streets. We developed a new dataset to assist pedestrians in urban scenes using 360-degree camera images. Through our dataset of Text360Nav, we aim to provide textual feedback from machinery visual perception such as 360-degree cameras to visually impaired individuals and distracted pedestrians navigating urban streets, including those engrossed in their smartphones while walking. In experiments, we combined our dataset with multimodal generative models and observed that models trained with our dataset can generate textual descriptions focusing on street objects and obstacles that are meaningful in urban scenes in both quantitative and qualitative analyses, thus supporting the effectiveness of our dataset for urban pedestrian navigation.

Assessing a company’s sustainable development goes beyond just financial metrics; the inclusion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors is becoming increasingly vital. The ML-ESG shared task series seeks to pioneer discussions on news-driven ESG ratings, drawing inspiration from the MSCI ESG rating guidelines. In its second edition, ML-ESG-2 emphasizes impact type identification, offering datasets in four languages: Chinese, English, French, and Japanese. Of the 28 teams registered, 8 participated in the official evaluation. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of ML-ESG-2, detailing the dataset specifics and summarizing the performance outcomes of the participating teams.