Structuring Sustainability Reports for Environmental Standards with LLMs guided by Ontology

Aida Usmanova, Ricardo Usbeck

Keywords: Corporate reporting, Ontology Learning, Knowledge Graphs

TL;DR: This study aims to extract climate change-related information according to ESRS 2 Topical Standard from corporate sustainability reports via LLMs with proposed Ontology guidance and represent them as Knowledge Graphs

Abstract:

Following the introduction of the European Sustainability Reporting Standard (ESRS), companies will have to adapt to a new policy and provide mandatory sustainability reports. However, implementing such reports entails a challenge, such as the comprehension of a large number of textual information from various sources. This task can be accelerated by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) and ontologies to effectively model the domain knowledge.

In this study, we extended an existing ontology to model ESRS Topical Standard for disclosure. The developed ontology would enable automated reasoning over the data and assist in constructing Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Moreover, the proposed ontology extension would also help to identify gaps in companies' sustainability reports with regard to the ESRS requirements.
Additionally, we extracted knowledge from corporate sustainability reports via LLMs guided with a proposed ontology and developed their KG representation.

Archival Submission: arxival

Submission Number: 23