Description

The publication describes how AI can be used to extract information on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from text documents. This will enable stakeholders to analyze which SDGs are mentioned in the sustainability reports of companies and organizations in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. Based on this, it is possible to determine the relevance of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for the respective institutions and how they could be supported.

Results

Various classifiers based on artificial neural networks were trained and tested on the SDG classification dataset. The project also investigated how the comprehensibility and transparency of the model results can be improved. The classification shows promising results. The usefulness of explanations in the context of SDG recognition was examined and confirmed through a user study. In addition, the models trained on the data and the evaluated explanations were integrated into the interactive demonstrator.

Background

The publication reports on the insights gained from  „A Transfer Learning Approach for SDGs Classification of Sustainability Reports“, a project funded by the Climate Change Center Berlin Brandenburg. The SDG demonstrator will be presented at the Association for Computational Linguistics 2024 and subsequently made publicly available.

Read the report (p. 197-200)

Picture: Philipp Arnoldt