@inproceedings{dimmelmeier-etal-2024-informing,
    title = "Informing climate risk analysis using textual information - A research agenda",
    author = "Dimmelmeier, Andreas  and
      Doll, Hendrik  and
      Schierholz, Malte  and
      Kormanyos, Emily  and
      Fehr, Maurice  and
      Ma, Bolei  and
      Beck, Jacob  and
      Fraser, Alexander  and
      Kreuter, Frauke",
    editor = "Stammbach, Dominik  and
      Ni, Jingwei  and
      Schimanski, Tobias  and
      Dutia, Kalyan  and
      Singh, Alok  and
      Bingler, Julia  and
      Christiaen, Christophe  and
      Kushwaha, Neetu  and
      Muccione, Veruska  and
      A. Vaghefi, Saeid  and
      Leippold, Markus",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.climatenlp-1.2",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.climatenlp-1.2",
    pages = "12--26",
    abstract = "We present a research agenda focused on efficiently extracting, assuring quality, and consolidating textual company sustainability information to address urgent climate change decision-making needs. Starting from the goal to create integrated FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) climate-related data, we identify research needs pertaining to the technical aspects of information extraction as well as to the design of the integrated sustainability datasets that we seek to compile. Regarding extraction, we leverage technological advancements, particularly in large language models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, to unlock the underutilized potential of unstructured textual information contained in corporate sustainability reports. In applying these techniques, we review key challenges, which include the retrieval and extraction of CO$_2$ emission values from PDF documents, especially from unstructured tables and graphs therein, and the validation of automatically extracted data through comparisons with human-annotated values. We also review how existing use cases and practices in climate risk analytics relate to choices of what textual information should be extracted and how it could be linked to existing structured data.",
}