1st Call for Participation: SustainEval 2025 - Understanding Sustainability Reports

We invite system and paper submissions for SustainEval 2025, a GermEval Shared Task co-located with KONVENS 2025 in Hildesheim, Germany, in September 2025.

With this shared task, we aim to fuel research on automatic analysis and detection of greenwashing by challenging participants to build systems that categorize excerpts from German sustainability reports for (A) content class and (B) statement verifiability rating.

Background: While corporate sustainability reporting aims to increase transparency, there is also a high incentive for companies to present themselves as environmentally friendly as possible, e.g. by selectively reporting only actions benefitting the environment and society, or by using vague optimistic language. This increasing tendency, known as "greenwashing" not only makes it difficult to tell apart concrete, verifiable actions from high-level plans and plain publicity, but can even blur the boundaries of the content reported in a given text passage according to a certain reporting criterion (e.g. actual greenhouse gas emissions vs. general tasks of some branch of the company).   Call for Workshop Papers: We also invite submission of original papers about analyzing sustainability texts with NLP and other aspects of sustainability and NLP. Papers should describe original, unpublished work and can be technical contributions of empirical or theoretical nature, literature surveys or opinion pieces. More details on paper format and submission will be published soon in a separate call for papers.

Important Dates

All submission deadlines are 11:59 p.m. UTC-12:00 "anywhere on Earth."Training & Development Data Release:14th March 2025Registration Deadline / Start Evaluation Phase:10th June 2025Workshop Paper Submission Deadline (tentative):10th June 2025System/Results Submission Deadline:27th June 2025System Description Paper Submission Deadline:11th July 2025System papers will be reviewed within 10 days after the submission deadlineCamera-ready Deadline:15th Aug 2025Workshop & Final Presentation: 10th Sept 2025

For more information, submission formats, and trial data please refer to the shared task homepage:

https://sustaineval.github.io/

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at sustaineval@gmail.com.

Best regards and happy holidays, The Shared Task Organizers

Jakob Prange, Universität Augsburg (contact for task-specific questions): jakob.prange@uni-a.de Charlott Jakob, TU Berlin (contact for organisational questions): c.jakob@tu-berlin.de Annemarie Friedrich, Universität Augsburg

--    Dr. Jakob Prange (er/he)  Akademischer Rat auf Zeit / Research Associate  Chair for Natural Language Understanding & Digital Humanities (Prof. Friedrich)  Faculty for Applied Informatics, University of Augsburg  https://jakpra.github.io/