Aida Usmanova
2026
ClimateCheck 2026: Scientific Fact-Checking and Disinformation Narrative Classification of Climate-related Claims
Raia Abu Ahmad | Max Upravitelev | Aida Usmanova | Veronika Solopova | Georg Rehm
Proceedings of Natural Scientific Language Processing (NSLP) @ LREC 2026
Raia Abu Ahmad | Max Upravitelev | Aida Usmanova | Veronika Solopova | Georg Rehm
Proceedings of Natural Scientific Language Processing (NSLP) @ LREC 2026
Automatically verifying climate-related claims against scientific literature is a challenging task, complicated by the specialised nature of scholarly evidence and the diversity of rhetorical strategies underlying climate disinformation. ClimateCheck 2026 is the second iteration of a shared task addressing this challenge, expanding on the 2025 edition with tripled training data and a new disinformation narrative classification task. Running from January to February 2026 on the CodaBench platform, the competition attracted 20 registered participants and 8 leaderboard submissions, with systems combining dense retrieval pipelines, cross-encoder ensembles, and large language models with structured hierarchical reasoning. In addition to standard evaluation metrics (Recall@K and Binary Preference), we adapt an automated framework to assess retrieval quality under incomplete annotations, exposing systematic biases in how conventional metrics rank systems. A cross-task analysis further reveals that not all climate disinformation is equally verifiable, potentially implicating how future fact-checking systems should be designed.
2025
The ClimateCheck Dataset: Mapping Social Media Claims About Climate Change to Corresponding Scholarly Articles
Raia Abu Ahmad | Aida Usmanova | Georg Rehm
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2025)
Raia Abu Ahmad | Aida Usmanova | Georg Rehm
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2025)
The rapid spread of misinformation on and through social media poses a significant challenge to public understanding of climate change and evidence-based policymaking. While natural language processing techniques have been used to analyse online discourse on climate change, no existing resources link social media claims to scientific literature. Thus, we introduce ClimateCheck, a human-annotated dataset that connects 435 unique, climate-related English claims in lay language to scientific abstracts. Each claim is connected to at least one and at most seventeen abstracts, resulting in 3,048 annotated claim-abstract pairs. The dataset aims to facilitate fact-checking and claim verification by leveraging scholarly document processing to improve access to scientific evidence in online discussions about climate change.
The ClimateCheck Shared Task: Scientific Fact-Checking of Social Media Claims about Climate Change
Raia Abu Ahmad | Aida Usmanova | Georg Rehm
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2025)
Raia Abu Ahmad | Aida Usmanova | Georg Rehm
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2025)
Misinformation in public discourse on global and significant issues like climate change is often facilitated through social media. However, current systems do not address fact-checking climate-related claims against trustworthy, evidence-based sources, such as scientific publications. We organised the ClimateCheck shared task at the 5th Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) Workshop, co-located with ACL 2025 in Vienna, Austria. The task featured two subtasks: 1. Abstracts retrieval given a claim, and 2. Claim verification based on the retrieved abstract. ClimateCheck had 27 registered users with active participation from 13 teams, ten of which submitted results for the first subtask and three for the second. The winning team achieved a Recall@10 score of 0.66 and a Binary Preference score of 0.49 for subtask I, and an F1 score of 0.73 for subtask II. Their method combined sparse retrieval using BM25, an ensemble of fine-tuned cross-encoder models using BGE-rerankers, and large language models for classification.
2024
TextGraphs 2024 Shared Task on Text-Graph Representations for Knowledge Graph Question Answering
Andrey Sakhovskiy | Mikhail Salnikov | Irina Nikishina | Aida Usmanova | Angelie Kraft | Cedric Möller | Debayan Banerjee | Junbo Huang | Longquan Jiang | Rana Abdullah | Xi Yan | Dmitry Ustalov | Elena Tutubalina | Ricardo Usbeck | Alexander Panchenko
Proceedings of TextGraphs-17: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing
Andrey Sakhovskiy | Mikhail Salnikov | Irina Nikishina | Aida Usmanova | Angelie Kraft | Cedric Möller | Debayan Banerjee | Junbo Huang | Longquan Jiang | Rana Abdullah | Xi Yan | Dmitry Ustalov | Elena Tutubalina | Ricardo Usbeck | Alexander Panchenko
Proceedings of TextGraphs-17: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing
This paper describes the results of the Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) shared task that was co-located with the TextGraphs 2024 workshop. In this task, given a textual question and a list of entities with the corresponding KG subgraphs, the participating system should choose the entity that correctly answers the question. Our competition attracted thirty teams, four of which outperformed our strong ChatGPT-based zero-shot baseline. In this paper, we overview the participating systems and analyze their performance according to a large-scale automatic evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first competition aimed at the KGQA problem using the interaction between large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs.
Structuring Sustainability Reports for Environmental Standards with LLMs guided by Ontology
Aida Usmanova | Ricardo Usbeck
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024)
Aida Usmanova | Ricardo Usbeck
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024)
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.