# Generating and Evaluating Sustainable Procurement Criteria for the Swiss Public Sector using In-Context Prompting with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22513 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22513/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4053/) (2014)
- [Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01535/) (2024)
- [Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05672/) (2024)
- [Sustainability of ICT hardware procurement in Switzerland -- A status-quo analysis of the public procurement sector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05372/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Public procurement refers to the process by which public sector institutions, such as governments, municipalities, and publicly funded bodies, acquire goods and services. Swiss law requires the integration of ecological, social, and economic sustainability requirements into tender evaluations in the format of criteria that have to be fulfilled by a bidder. However, translating high-level sustainability regulations into concrete, verifiable, and sector-specific procurement criteria (such as selection criteria, award criteria, and technical specifications) remains a labor-intensive and error-prone manual task, requiring substantial domain expertise in several groups of goods and services and considerable manual effort. This paper presents a configurable, LLM-assisted pipeline that is presented as a software supporting the systematic generation and evaluation of sustainability-oriented procurement criteria catalogs for Switzerland. The system integrates in-context prompting, interchangeable LLM backends, and automated output validation to enable auditable criteria generation across different procurement sectors. As a proof of concept, we instantiate the pipeline using official sustainability guidelines published by the Swiss government and the European Commission, which are ingested as structured reference documents. We evaluate the system through a combination of automated quality checks, including an LLM-based evaluation component, and expert comparison against a manually curated gold standard. Our results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline can substantially reduce manual drafting effort while producing criteria catalogs that are consistent with official guidelines. We further discuss system limitations, failure modes, and design trade-offs observed during deployment, highlighting key considerations for integrating generative AI into public sector software workflows.