# SustainableQA: A Comprehensive Question Answering Dataset for Corporate Sustainability and EU Taxonomy Reporting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03000 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03000/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agentic RAG, agents and memory, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 19 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Agentic RAG, agents and memory](https://mlsanity.com/rag/agentic-rag-agents-and-memory/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00122/) (2021)
- [TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07624/) (2021)
- [ConvFinQA: Exploring the Chain of Numerical Reasoning in Conversational Finance Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03849/) (2022)
- [MultiHiertt: Numerical Reasoning over Multi Hierarchical Tabular and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01347/) (2022)
- [FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09980/) (2024)
- [Improving Retrieval for RAG based Question Answering Models on Financial Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07221/) (2024)
- [CHATREPORT: Democratizing Sustainability Disclosure Analysis through LLM-based Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15770/) (2023)
- [OmniEval: An Omnidirectional and Automatic RAG Evaluation Benchmark in Financial Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13018/) (2024)
- [ESGReveal: An LLM-based approach for extracting structured data from ESG reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17264/) (2023)
- [ClimRetrieve: A Benchmarking Dataset for Information Retrieval from Corporate Climate Disclosures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09818/) (2024)
- [ESGenius: Benchmarking LLMs on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01646/) (2025)
- [SusGen-GPT: A Data-Centric LLM for Financial NLP and Sustainability Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10906/) (2024)
- [Optimizing Large Language Models for ESG Activity Detection in Financial Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21112/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [TEMPO: A Realistic Multi-Domain Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09523/) (2026)
- [Doc-PP: Document Policy Preservation Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03926/) (2026)
- [Citation-Closure Retrieval and Per-Rule Attribution for Real-World Regulatory Compliance Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29742/) (2026)
- [HIVE: Query, Hypothesize, Verify An LLM Framework for Multimodal Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07220/) (2026)
- [REGREACT: Self-Correcting Multi-Agent Pipelines for Structured Regulatory Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12054/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The growing demand for corporate sustainability transparency, particularly under new regulations like the EU Taxonomy, necessitates precise data extraction from large, unstructured corporate reports, a task for which Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems require high-quality, domain-specific question-answering datasets. To address this, we introduce SustainableQA, a novel dataset and a scalable pipeline that generates comprehensive QA pairs from corporate sustainability and annual reports by integrating semantic chunk classification, a hybrid span extraction pipeline, and a specialized table-to-paragraph transformation. To ensure high quality, the generation is followed by a novel automated assessment and refinement pipeline that systematically validates each QA pair for faithfulness and relevance, repairing or discarding low-quality entries. This results in a final, robust dataset of over 195,000 diverse factoid and non-factoid QA pairs, whose effectiveness is demonstrated by initial fine-tuning experiments where a compact 8B parameter model outperforms much larger state-of-the-art models. These results demonstrate the potential of SustainableQA as a resource for developing and benchmarking advanced knowledge assistants capable of navigating complex sustainability compliance data