Quantifying Organizational Environmental Action from Web Data and Large Language Models

📅 2026-09-15
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
本文提出一种计算框架,利用大型语言模型从非结构化的网络内容中提取组织的环保行动信息,解决了相关数据分散且难以量化的难题。
📝 Abstract
Quantifying organizational environmental action from publicly available web content remains a challenging environmental data science problem because relevant information can be dispersed across multiple webpages and is primarily communicated through unstructured text. We present a scalable computational framework for transforming organizational web content into structured measures of environmental action and demonstrate the approach using Jewish congregations in the United States. We constructed a national database of 4,964 congregations by integrating multiple geospatial, knowledge-base, directory, and manually reviewed sources. Of these, 2,657 had active websites that were successfully crawled, producing a corpus of 154,454 webpages. We compared three approaches for detecting environmental actions: keyword retrieval followed by large language model (LLM) classification, semantic vector retrieval followed by LLM classification, and direct LLM classification classification without preliminary retrieval. Agreement with an expert human reviewer was lowest for keyword retrieval ($κ$ = 0.26), higher for semantic vector retrieval ($κ$ = 0.42), and similar for direct LLM classification ($κ$ = 0.40). Although semantic retrieval achieved the highest agreement, its retrieval recall was 0.87, indicating loss of relevant content before classification. Applied to the complete corpus, direct LLM classification identified at least one environmental action at 1,398 congregations (53%), providing greater coverage than either retrieval-based approach. These results demonstrate that preliminary retrieval can reduce computational cost but may exclude relevant information before it reaches the classifier. The framework provides a reproducible approach for extracting organization-level environmental information from unstructured web content that can be adapted to other institutions.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Organizational Environmental Action
Web Data
Large Language Models
Unstructured Text
Environmental Data Science
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

large language model
unstructured web content
environmental action
semantic vector retrieval
scalable computational framework
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