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arXiv · 2508.03000

SustainableQA: A Comprehensive Question Answering Dataset for Corporate Sustainability and EU Taxonomy Reporting

Mohammed Ali·Abdelrahman Abdallah·Adam Jatowt
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Abstract

The growing demand for corporate sustainability transparency, particularly under new regulations like the EU Taxonomy, necessitates precise data extraction from large, unstructured corporate reports, a task for which Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems require high-quality, domain-specific question-answering datasets. To address this, we introduce SustainableQA, a novel dataset and a scalable pipeline that generates comprehensive QA pairs from corporate sustainability and annual reports by integrating semantic chunk classification, a hybrid span extraction pipeline, and a specialized table-to-paragraph transformation. To ensure high quality, the generation is followed by a novel automated assessment and refinement pipeline that systematically validates each QA pair for faithfulness and relevance, repairing or discarding low-quality entries. This results in a final, robust dataset of over 195,000 diverse factoid and non-factoid QA pairs, whose effectiveness is demonstrated by initial fine-tuning experiments where a compact 8B parameter model outperforms much larger state-of-the-art models. These results demonstrate the potential of SustainableQA as a resource for developing and benchmarking advanced knowledge assistants capable of navigating complex sustainability compliance data

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Mohammed Ali, Abdelrahman Abdallah, Adam Jatowt. 2025-08-05. SustainableQA: A Comprehensive Question Answering Dataset for Corporate Sustainability and EU Taxonomy Reporting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03000

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