arXiv subjects

Markus Leippold

Publications and source records attributed to Markus Leippold.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Assessing Large Language Models on Climate Information

As Large Language Models (LLMs) rise in popularity, it is necessary to assess their capability in critically relevant domains. We present a comprehensive evaluation framework, grounded in science communication research, to assess LLM responses to questions about climate change. Our framework emphasizes both presentational and epistemological adequacy, offering a fine-grained analysis of LLM generations spanning 8 dimensions and 30 issues. Our evaluation task is a real-world example of a growing number of challenging problems where AI can complement and lift human performance. We introduce a novel protocol for scalable oversight that relies on AI Assistance and raters with relevant education. We evaluate several recent LLMs on a set of diverse climate questions. Our results point to a significant gap between surface and epistemological qualities of LLMs in the realm of climate communication.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Automated Fact-Checking of Climate Change Claims with Large Language Models

This paper presents Climinator, a novel AI-based tool designed to automate the fact-checking of climate change claims. Utilizing an array of Large Language Models (LLMs) informed by authoritative sources like the IPCC reports and peer-reviewed scientific literature, Climinator employs an innovative Mediator-Advocate framework. This design allows Climinator to effectively synthesize varying scientific perspectives, leading to robust, evidence-based evaluations. Our model demonstrates remarkable accuracy when testing claims collected from Climate Feedback and Skeptical Science. Notably, when integrating an advocate with a climate science denial perspective in our framework, Climinator's iterative debate process reliably converges towards scientific consensus, underscoring its adeptness at reconciling diverse viewpoints into science-based, factual conclusions. While our research is subject to certain limitations and necessitates careful interpretation, our approach holds significant potential. We hope to stimulate further research and encourage exploring its applicability in other contexts, including political fact-checking and legal domains.

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arXiv2023

Exploring Nature: Datasets and Models for Analyzing Nature-Related Disclosures

Nature is an amorphous concept. Yet, it is essential for the planet's well-being to understand how the economy interacts with it. To address the growing demand for information on corporate nature disclosure, we provide datasets and classifiers to detect nature communication by companies. We ground our approach in the guidelines of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). Particularly, we focus on the specific dimensions of water, forest, and biodiversity. For each dimension, we create an expert-annotated dataset with 2,200 text samples and train classifier models. Furthermore, we show that nature communication is more prevalent in hotspot areas and directly effected industries like agriculture and utilities. Our approach is the first to respond to calls to assess corporate nature communication on a large scale.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Paradigm Shift in Sustainability Disclosure Analysis: Empowering Stakeholders with CHATREPORT, a Language Model-Based Tool

This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) with expert knowledge to automate the analysis of corporate sustainability reports by benchmarking them against the Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommendations. Corporate sustainability reports are crucial in assessing organizations' environmental and social risks and impacts. However, analyzing these reports' vast amounts of information makes human analysis often too costly. As a result, only a few entities worldwide have the resources to analyze these reports, which could lead to a lack of transparency. While AI-powered tools can automatically analyze the data, they are prone to inaccuracies as they lack domain-specific expertise. This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance LLMs with expert knowledge to automate the analysis of corporate sustainability reports. We christen our tool CHATREPORT, and apply it in a first use case to assess corporate climate risk disclosures following the TCFD recommendations. CHATREPORT results from collaborating with experts in climate science, finance, economic policy, and computer science, demonstrating how domain experts can be involved in developing AI tools. We make our prompt templates, generated data, and scores available to the public to encourage transparency.

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arXiv2023

ClimateBERT-NetZero: Detecting and Assessing Net Zero and Reduction Targets

Public and private actors struggle to assess the vast amounts of information about sustainability commitments made by various institutions. To address this problem, we create a novel tool for automatically detecting corporate, national, and regional net zero and reduction targets in three steps. First, we introduce an expert-annotated data set with 3.5K text samples. Second, we train and release ClimateBERT-NetZero, a natural language classifier to detect whether a text contains a net zero or reduction target. Third, we showcase its analysis potential with two use cases: We first demonstrate how ClimateBERT-NetZero can be combined with conventional question-answering (Q&A) models to analyze the ambitions displayed in net zero and reduction targets. Furthermore, we employ the ClimateBERT-NetZero model on quarterly earning call transcripts and outline how communication patterns evolve over time. Our experiments demonstrate promising pathways for extracting and analyzing net zero and emission reduction targets at scale.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

CHATREPORT: Democratizing Sustainability Disclosure Analysis through LLM-based Tools

In the face of climate change, are companies really taking substantial steps toward more sustainable operations? A comprehensive answer lies in the dense, information-rich landscape of corporate sustainability reports. However, the sheer volume and complexity of these reports make human analysis very costly. Therefore, only a few entities worldwide have the resources to analyze these reports at scale, which leads to a lack of transparency in sustainability reporting. Empowering stakeholders with LLM-based automatic analysis tools can be a promising way to democratize sustainability report analysis. However, developing such tools is challenging due to (1) the hallucination of LLMs and (2) the inefficiency of bringing domain experts into the AI development loop. In this paper, we ChatReport, a novel LLM-based system to automate the analysis of corporate sustainability reports, addressing existing challenges by (1) making the answers traceable to reduce the harm of hallucination and (2) actively involving domain experts in the development loop. We make our methodology, annotated datasets, and generated analyses of 1015 reports publicly available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Environmental Claim Detection

To transition to a green economy, environmental claims made by companies must be reliable, comparable, and verifiable. To analyze such claims at scale, automated methods are needed to detect them in the first place. However, there exist no datasets or models for this. Thus, this paper introduces the task of environmental claim detection. To accompany the task, we release an expert-annotated dataset and models trained on this dataset. We preview one potential application of such models: We detect environmental claims made in quarterly earning calls and find that the number of environmental claims has steadily increased since the Paris Agreement in 2015.

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arXiv2023

When Does Aggregating Multiple Skills with Multi-Task Learning Work? A Case Study in Financial NLP

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims at achieving a better model by leveraging data and knowledge from multiple tasks. However, MTL does not always work -- sometimes negative transfer occurs between tasks, especially when aggregating loosely related skills, leaving it an open question when MTL works. Previous studies show that MTL performance can be improved by algorithmic tricks. However, what tasks and skills should be included is less well explored. In this work, we conduct a case study in Financial NLP where multiple datasets exist for skills relevant to the domain, such as numeric reasoning and sentiment analysis. Due to the task difficulty and data scarcity in the Financial NLP domain, we explore when aggregating such diverse skills from multiple datasets with MTL can work. Our findings suggest that the key to MTL success lies in skill diversity, relatedness between tasks, and choice of aggregation size and shared capacity. Specifically, MTL works well when tasks are diverse but related, and when the size of the task aggregation and the shared capacity of the model are balanced to avoid overwhelming certain tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

chatClimate: Grounding Conversational AI in Climate Science

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in recent years, achieving remarkable results in question-answering tasks (QA). However, they still face two major challenges: hallucination and outdated information after the training phase. These challenges take center stage in critical domains like climate change, where obtaining accurate and up-to-date information from reliable sources in a limited time is essential and difficult. To overcome these barriers, one potential solution is to provide LLMs with access to external, scientifically accurate, and robust sources (long-term memory) to continuously update their knowledge and prevent the propagation of inaccurate, incorrect, or outdated information. In this study, we enhanced GPT-4 by integrating the information from the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental (IPCC AR6), the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and reliable source in this domain. We present our conversational AI prototype, available at www.chatclimate.ai and demonstrate its ability to answer challenging questions accurately in three different QA scenarios: asking from 1) GPT-4, 2) chatClimate, and 3) hybrid chatClimate. The answers and their sources were evaluated by our team of IPCC authors, who used their expert knowledge to score the accuracy of the answers from 1 (very-low) to 5 (very-high). The evaluation showed that the hybrid chatClimate provided more accurate answers, highlighting the effectiveness of our solution. This approach can be easily scaled for chatbots in specific domains, enabling the delivery of reliable and accurate information.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Enhancing Large Language Models with Climate Resources

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly transformed the landscape of artificial intelligence by demonstrating their ability in generating human-like text across diverse topics. However, despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs lack recent information and often employ imprecise language, which can be detrimental in domains where accuracy is crucial, such as climate change. In this study, we make use of recent ideas to harness the potential of LLMs by viewing them as agents that access multiple sources, including databases containing recent and precise information about organizations, institutions, and companies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a prototype agent that retrieves emission data from ClimateWatch (https://www.climatewatchdata.org/) and leverages general Google search. By integrating these resources with LLMs, our approach overcomes the limitations associated with imprecise language and delivers more reliable and accurate information in the critical domain of climate change. This work paves the way for future advancements in LLMs and their application in domains where precision is of paramount importance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

ClimateBert: A Pretrained Language Model for Climate-Related Text

Over the recent years, large pretrained language models (LM) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP). However, while pretraining on general language has been shown to work very well for common language, it has been observed that niche language poses problems. In particular, climate-related texts include specific language that common LMs can not represent accurately. We argue that this shortcoming of today's LMs limits the applicability of modern NLP to the broad field of text processing of climate-related texts. As a remedy, we propose CLIMATEBERT, a transformer-based language model that is further pretrained on over 2 million paragraphs of climate-related texts, crawled from various sources such as common news, research articles, and climate reporting of companies. We find that CLIMATEBERT leads to a 48% improvement on a masked language model objective which, in turn, leads to lowering error rates by 3.57% to 35.71% for various climate-related downstream tasks like text classification, sentiment analysis, and fact-checking.

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arXiv2022

Towards Climate Awareness in NLP Research

The climate impact of AI, and NLP research in particular, has become a serious issue given the enormous amount of energy that is increasingly being used for training and running computational models. Consequently, increasing focus is placed on efficient NLP. However, this important initiative lacks simple guidelines that would allow for systematic climate reporting of NLP research. We argue that this deficiency is one of the reasons why very few publications in NLP report key figures that would allow a more thorough examination of environmental impact. As a remedy, we propose a climate performance model card with the primary purpose of being practically usable with only limited information about experiments and the underlying computer hardware. We describe why this step is essential to increase awareness about the environmental impact of NLP research and, thereby, paving the way for more thorough discussions.

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arXiv2021

ClimaText: A Dataset for Climate Change Topic Detection

Climate change communication in the mass media and other textual sources may affect and shape public perception. Extracting climate change information from these sources is an important task, e.g., for filtering content and e-discovery, sentiment analysis, automatic summarization, question-answering, and fact-checking. However, automating this process is a challenge, as climate change is a complex, fast-moving, and often ambiguous topic with scarce resources for popular text-based AI tasks. In this paper, we introduce \textsc{ClimaText}, a dataset for sentence-based climate change topic detection, which we make publicly available. We explore different approaches to identify the climate change topic in various text sources. We find that popular keyword-based models are not adequate for such a complex and evolving task. Context-based algorithms like BERT \cite{devlin2018bert} can detect, in addition to many trivial cases, a variety of complex and implicit topic patterns. Nevertheless, our analysis reveals a great potential for improvement in several directions, such as, e.g., capturing the discussion on indirect effects of climate change. Hence, we hope this work can serve as a good starting point for further research on this topic.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

CLIMATE-FEVER: A Dataset for Verification of Real-World Climate Claims

We introduce CLIMATE-FEVER, a new publicly available dataset for verification of climate change-related claims. By providing a dataset for the research community, we aim to facilitate and encourage work on improving algorithms for retrieving evidential support for climate-specific claims, addressing the underlying language understanding challenges, and ultimately help alleviate the impact of misinformation on climate change. We adapt the methodology of FEVER [1], the largest dataset of artificially designed claims, to real-life claims collected from the Internet. While during this process, we could rely on the expertise of renowned climate scientists, it turned out to be no easy task. We discuss the surprising, subtle complexity of modeling real-world climate-related claims within the \textsc{fever} framework, which we believe provides a valuable challenge for general natural language understanding. We hope that our work will mark the beginning of a new exciting long-term joint effort by the climate science and AI community.

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arXiv2020

Generating Fact Checking Summaries for Web Claims

We present SUMO, a neural attention-based approach that learns to establish the correctness of textual claims based on evidence in the form of text documents (e.g., news articles or Web documents). SUMO further generates an extractive summary by presenting a diversified set of sentences from the documents that explain its decision on the correctness of the textual claim. Prior approaches to address the problem of fact checking and evidence extraction have relied on simple concatenation of claim and document word embeddings as an input to claim driven attention weight computation. This is done so as to extract salient words and sentences from the documents that help establish the correctness of the claim. However, this design of claim-driven attention does not capture the contextual information in documents properly. We improve on the prior art by using improved claim and title guided hierarchical attention to model effective contextual cues. We show the efficacy of our approach on datasets concerning political, healthcare, and environmental issues.

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arXiv2020

MuSeM: Detecting Incongruent News Headlines using Mutual Attentive Semantic Matching

Measuring the congruence between two texts has several useful applications, such as detecting the prevalent deceptive and misleading news headlines on the web. Many works have proposed machine learning based solutions such as text similarity between the headline and body text to detect the incongruence. Text similarity based methods fail to perform well due to different inherent challenges such as relative length mismatch between the news headline and its body content and non-overlapping vocabulary. On the other hand, more recent works that use headline guided attention to learn a headline derived contextual representation of the news body also result in convoluting overall representation due to the news body's lengthiness. This paper proposes a method that uses inter-mutual attention-based semantic matching between the original and synthetically generated headlines, which utilizes the difference between all pairs of word embeddings of words involved. The paper also investigates two more variations of our method, which use concatenation and dot-products of word embeddings of the words of original and synthetic headlines. We observe that the proposed method outperforms prior arts significantly for two publicly available datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2010

Quantile estimation with adaptive importance sampling

We introduce new quantile estimators with adaptive importance sampling. The adaptive estimators are based on weighted samples that are neither independent nor identically distributed. Using a new law of iterated logarithm for martingales, we prove the convergence of the adaptive quantile estimators for general distributions with nonunique quantiles thereby extending the work of Feldman and Tucker [Ann. Math. Statist. 37 (1996) 451--457]. We illustrate the algorithm with an example from credit portfolio risk analysis.

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