CF-RAG: A Dataset and Method for Carbon Footprint QA Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhao, Kaiwen, Balaji, Bharathan, Lee, Stephen
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhao, Kaiwen
Balaji, Bharathan
Lee, Stephen
author_facet Zhao, Kaiwen
Balaji, Bharathan
Lee, Stephen
contents Product sustainability reports provide valuable insights into the environmental impacts of a product and are often distributed in PDF format. These reports often include a combination of tables and text, which complicates their analysis. The lack of standardization and the variability in reporting formats further exacerbate the difficulty of extracting and interpreting relevant information from large volumes of documents. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of answering questions related to carbon footprints within sustainability reports available in PDF format. Unlike previous approaches, our focus is on addressing the difficulties posed by the unstructured and inconsistent nature of text extracted from PDF parsing. To facilitate this analysis, we introduce CarbonPDF-QA, an open-source dataset containing question-answer pairs for 1735 product report documents, along with human-annotated answers. Our analysis shows that GPT-4o struggles to answer questions with data inconsistencies. To address this limitation, we propose CarbonPDF, an LLM-based technique specifically designed to answer carbon footprint questions on such datasets. We develop CarbonPDF by fine-tuning Llama 3 with our training data. Our results show that our technique outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques, including question-answering (QA) systems finetuned on table and text data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_03489
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CF-RAG: A Dataset and Method for Carbon Footprint QA Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Zhao, Kaiwen
Balaji, Bharathan
Lee, Stephen
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Product sustainability reports provide valuable insights into the environmental impacts of a product and are often distributed in PDF format. These reports often include a combination of tables and text, which complicates their analysis. The lack of standardization and the variability in reporting formats further exacerbate the difficulty of extracting and interpreting relevant information from large volumes of documents. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of answering questions related to carbon footprints within sustainability reports available in PDF format. Unlike previous approaches, our focus is on addressing the difficulties posed by the unstructured and inconsistent nature of text extracted from PDF parsing. To facilitate this analysis, we introduce CarbonPDF-QA, an open-source dataset containing question-answer pairs for 1735 product report documents, along with human-annotated answers. Our analysis shows that GPT-4o struggles to answer questions with data inconsistencies. To address this limitation, we propose CarbonPDF, an LLM-based technique specifically designed to answer carbon footprint questions on such datasets. We develop CarbonPDF by fine-tuning Llama 3 with our training data. Our results show that our technique outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques, including question-answering (QA) systems finetuned on table and text data.
title CF-RAG: A Dataset and Method for Carbon Footprint QA Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03489