Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports have become central to how companies communicate climate risk, social impact, and governance practices, yet they are still published primarily as long, heterogeneous PDF documents. This makes it difficult to systematically answer seemingly simple questions. Existing tools either rely on brittle rule-based extraction or treat ESG reports as generic text, without explicitly modelling the underlying reporting standards. We present \textbf{EulerESG}, an LLM-powered system for automating ESG disclosure analysis with explicit awareness of ESG frameworks. EulerESG combines (i) dual-channel retrieval and LLM-driven disclosure analysis over ESG reports, and (ii) an interactive dashboard and chatbot for exploration, benchmarking, and explanation. Using four globally recognised companies and twelve SASB sub-industries, we show that EulerESG can automatically populate standard-aligned metric tables with high fidelity (up to 0.95 average accuracy) while remaining practical in end-to-end runtime, and we compare several recent LLM models in this setting. The full implementation, together with a demonstration video, is publicly available at https://github.com/UNSW-database/EulerESG.

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles are reshaping the foundations of global financial gover- nance, transforming capital allocation architectures, regu- latory frameworks, and systemic risk coordination mecha- nisms. However, as the core medium for assessing corpo- rate ESG performance, the ESG reports present significant challenges for large-scale understanding, due to chaotic read- ing order from slide-like irregular layouts and implicit hier- archies arising from lengthy, weakly structured content. To address these challenges, we propose Pharos-ESG, a uni- fied framework that transforms ESG reports into structured representations through multimodal parsing, contextual nar- ration, and hierarchical labeling. It integrates a reading-order modeling module based on layout flow, hierarchy-aware seg- mentation guided by table-of-contents anchors, and a multi- modal aggregation pipeline that contextually transforms vi- sual elements into coherent natural language. The framework further enriches its outputs with ESG, GRI, and sentiment labels, yielding annotations aligned with the analytical de- mands of financial research. Extensive experiments on anno- tated benchmarks demonstrate that Pharos-ESG consistently outperforms both dedicated document parsing systems and general-purpose multimodal models. In addition, we release Aurora-ESG, the first large-scale public dataset of ESG re- ports, spanning Mainland China, Hong Kong, and U.S. mar- kets, featuring unified structured representations of multi- modal content, enriched with fine-grained layout and seman- tic annotations to better support ESG integration in financial governance and decision-making.

The rapid growth of the financial sector and the rising focus on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations highlight the need for advanced NLP tools. However, open-source LLMs proficient in both finance and ESG domains remain scarce. To address this gap, we introduce SusGen-30K, a category-balanced dataset comprising seven financial NLP tasks and ESG report generation, and propose TCFD-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating sustainability report generation. Leveraging this dataset, we developed SusGen-GPT, a suite of models achieving state-of-the-art performance across six adapted and two off-the-shelf tasks, trailing GPT-4 by only 2% despite using 7-8B parameters compared to GPT-4's 1,700B. Based on this, we propose the SusGen system, integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), to assist in sustainability report generation. This work demonstrates the efficiency of our approach, advancing research in finance and ESG.

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.

Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) KPIs assess an organization's performance on issues such as climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, waste management, human rights, diversity, and policies. ESG reports convey this valuable quantitative information through tables. Unfortunately, extracting this information is difficult due to high variability in the table structure as well as content. We propose Statements, a novel domain agnostic data structure for extracting quantitative facts and related information. We propose translating tables to statements as a new supervised deep-learning universal information extraction task. We introduce SemTabNet - a dataset of over 100K annotated tables. Investigating a family of T5-based Statement Extraction Models, our best model generates statements which are 82% similar to the ground-truth (compared to baseline of 21%). We demonstrate the advantages of statements by applying our model to over 2700 tables from ESG reports. The homogeneous nature of statements permits exploratory data analysis on expansive information found in large collections of ESG reports.

In the evolving field of corporate sustainability, analyzing unstructured Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports is a complex challenge due to their varied formats and intricate content. This study introduces an innovative methodology utilizing the "Unstructured Core Library", specifically tailored to address these challenges by transforming ESG reports into structured, analyzable formats. Our approach significantly advances the existing research by offering high-precision text cleaning, adept identification and extraction of text from images, and standardization of tables within these reports. Emphasizing its capability to handle diverse data types, including text, images, and tables, the method adeptly manages the nuances of differing page layouts and report styles across industries. This research marks a substantial contribution to the fields of industrial ecology and corporate sustainability assessment, paving the way for the application of advanced NLP technologies and large language models in the analysis of corporate governance and sustainability. Our code is available at https://github.com/linancn/TianGong-AI-Unstructure.git.

ESGReveal is an innovative method proposed for efficiently extracting and analyzing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data from corporate reports, catering to the critical need for reliable ESG information retrieval. This approach utilizes Large Language Models (LLM) enhanced with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques. The ESGReveal system includes an ESG metadata module for targeted queries, a preprocessing module for assembling databases, and an LLM agent for data extraction. Its efficacy was appraised using ESG reports from 166 companies across various sectors listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2022, ensuring comprehensive industry and market capitalization representation. Utilizing ESGReveal unearthed significant insights into ESG reporting with GPT-4, demonstrating an accuracy of 76.9% in data extraction and 83.7% in disclosure analysis, which is an improvement over baseline models. This highlights the framework's capacity to refine ESG data analysis precision. Moreover, it revealed a demand for reinforced ESG disclosures, with environmental and social data disclosures standing at 69.5% and 57.2%, respectively, suggesting a pursuit for more corporate transparency. While current iterations of ESGReveal do not process pictorial information, a functionality intended for future enhancement, the study calls for continued research to further develop and compare the analytical capabilities of various LLMs. In summary, ESGReveal is a stride forward in ESG data processing, offering stakeholders a sophisticated tool to better evaluate and advance corporate sustainability efforts. Its evolution is promising in promoting transparency in corporate reporting and aligning with broader sustainable development aims.

We present Deep Search DocQA. This application enables information extraction from documents via a question-answering conversational assistant. The system integrates several technologies from different AI disciplines consisting of document conversion to machine-readable format (via computer vision), finding relevant data (via natural language processing), and formulating an eloquent response (via large language models). Users can explore over 10,000 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure reports from over 2000 corporations. The Deep Search platform can be accessed at: https://ds4sd.github.io.

Table of contents (ToC) extraction centres on structuring documents in a hierarchical manner. In this paper, we propose a new dataset, ESGDoc, comprising 1,093 ESG annual reports from 563 companies spanning from 2001 to 2022. These reports pose significant challenges due to their diverse structures and extensive length. To address these challenges, we propose a new framework for Toc extraction, consisting of three steps: (1) Constructing an initial tree of text blocks based on reading order and font sizes; (2) Modelling each tree node (or text block) independently by considering its contextual information captured in node-centric subtree; (3) Modifying the original tree by taking appropriate action on each tree node (Keep, Delete, or Move). This construction-modelling-modification (CMM) process offers several benefits. It eliminates the need for pairwise modelling of section headings as in previous approaches, making document segmentation practically feasible. By incorporating structured information, each section heading can leverage both local and long-distance context relevant to itself. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art baseline with a fraction of running time. Our framework proves its scalability by effectively handling documents of any length.

Download the research report from ESG, and learn how predictive analytics and machine learning can help optimize application performance and meet the needs of the business with Nimble Storage Infosight. The performance of enterprise applications will have a direct impact on business activities and outcomes. The quality of the delivery of applications will depend on how smoothly the underlying data infrastructure operates.