Sara Pederzoli


2026

Sustainability reports contain rich Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) information, but their heterogeneous layouts and complex multi-table structures pose major challenges for LLMs, especially for unit normalization, cross-document reasoning, and precise numerical computation. We present CLARIESG, an end-to-end system that couples robust table extraction with a structured prompting framework for multi-table filtering, normalization, and program-of-thought reasoning. On ESG-focused multi-table benchmarks, CLARIESG consistently outperforms standard prompting and provides transparent, auditable reasoning, supporting more reliable ESG analysis and greenwashing detection in real-world settings.

2025

Assessing corporate environmental sustainability with Table Question Answering systems is challenging due to complex tables, specialized terminology, and the variety of questions they must handle. In this paper, we introduce GRI-QA, a test benchmark designed to evaluate Table QA approaches in the environmental domain. Using GRI standards, we extract and annotate tables from non-financial corporate reports, generating question-answer pairs through a hybrid LLM-human approach. The benchmark includes eight datasets, categorized by the types of operations required, including operations on multiple tables from multiple documents. Our evaluation reveals a significant gap between human and model performance, particularly in multi-step reasoning, highlighting the relevance of the benchmark and the need for further research in domain-specific Table QA. Code and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/softlab-unimore/gri_qa.