@inproceedings{bergeron-etal-2024-blu,
    title = "{BLU}-{S}yn{T}ra: Distinguish Synergies and Trade-offs between Sustainable Development Goals Using Small Language Models",
    author = "Bergeron, Loris  and
      Francois, Jerome  and
      State, Radu  and
      Hilger, Jean",
    editor = "Chen, Chung-Chi  and
      Liu, Xiaomo  and
      Hahn, Udo  and
      Nourbakhsh, Armineh  and
      Ma, Zhiqiang  and
      Smiley, Charese  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Das, Sanjiv Ranjan  and
      Li, Manling  and
      Ghassemi, Mohammad  and
      Huang, Hen-Hsen  and
      Takamura, Hiroya  and
      Chen, Hsin-Hsi",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Joint Workshop of the 7th Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing, the 5th Knowledge Discovery from Unstructured Data in Financial Services, and the 4th Workshop on Economics and Natural Language Processing",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.finnlp-1.3",
    pages = "21--33",
    abstract = "Since the United Nations defined the Sustainable Development Goals, studies have shown that these goals are interlinked in different ways. The concept of SDG interlinkages refers to the complex network of interactions existing within and between the SDGs themselves. These interactions are referred to as synergies and trade-offs. Synergies represent positive interactions where the progress of one SDG contributes positively to the progress of another. On the other hand, trade-offs are negative interactions where the progress of one SDG has a negative impact on another. However, evaluating such interlinkages is a complex task, not only because of the multidimensional nature of SDGs, but also because it is highly exposed to personal interpretation bias and technical limitations. Recent studies are mainly based on expert judgements, literature reviews, sentiment or data analysis. To remedy these limitations we propose the use of Small Language Models in addition of an advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation to distinguish synergies and trade-offs between SDGs. In order to validate our results, we have drawn on the study carried out by the European Commission{'}s Joint Research Centre which provides a database of interlinkages labelled according to the presence of synergies or trade-offs.",
}

Since the United Nations defined the Sustainable Development Goals, studies have shown that these goals are interlinked in different ways. The concept of SDG interlinkages refers to the complex network of interactions existing within and between the SDGs themselves. These interactions are referred to as synergies and trade-offs. Synergies represent positive interactions where the progress of one SDG contributes positively to the progress of another. On the other hand, trade-offs are negative interactions where the progress of one SDG has a negative impact on another. However, evaluating such interlinkages is a complex task, not only because of the multidimensional nature of SDGs, but also because it is highly exposed to personal interpretation bias and technical limitations. Recent studies are mainly based on expert judgements, literature reviews, sentiment or data analysis. To remedy these limitations we propose the use of Small Language Models in addition of an advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation to distinguish synergies and trade-offs between SDGs. In order to validate our results, we have drawn on the study carried out by the European Commission{'}s Joint Research Centre which provides a database of interlinkages labelled according to the presence of synergies or trade-offs.
Bergeron, Loris Francois, Jerome State, Radu Hilger, Jean
BLU-SynTra: Distinguish Synergies and Trade-offs between Sustainable Development Goals Using Small Language Models