# Leveraging Language Models to Detect Greenwashing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01469 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01469/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ClimateBert: A Pretrained Language Model for Climate-Related Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12010/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, climate change repercussions have increasingly captured public interest. Consequently, corporations are emphasizing their environmental efforts in sustainability reports to bolster their public image. Yet, the absence of stringent regulations in review of such reports allows potential greenwashing. In this study, we introduce a novel preliminary methodology to train a language model on generated labels for greenwashing risk. Our primary contributions encompass: developing a preliminary mathematical formulation to quantify greenwashing risk, a fine-tuned ClimateBERT model for this problem, and a comparative analysis of results. On a test set comprising of sustainability reports, our best model achieved an average accuracy score of 86.34% and F1 score of 0.67, demonstrating that our proof-of-concept methodology shows a promising direction of exploration for this task.