(287b) Uncovering Sustainability Trends in Industry Through Text Mining

Sustainability is widely recognized as one of the most important challenges today. Sustainability is inherently multi-faceted and issues around energy, water, climate change, and the environment have attracted attention. It has also spawned numerous research activities resulting in various novel technologies. In parallel, industries have also made sustainability a priority.  In this paper, we seek to identify the key sustainability directions undertaken by the process industries through text mining of their corporate sustainability reports.

Text mining, or text data mining, seeks to extract meaningful quantitative information from unstructured textual data.   It typically consists of three steps – (1) parsing the input data and imposing a structure on it, (2) identifying patterns in the structured data through well-established data mining techniques such as clustering or visualization, and (3) evaluation and interpretation of the results for novelty and interestingness.  In this paper, after a review of the basic techniques of text mining, we report the key insights obtained from text mining of over 1000 corporate sustainability reports from 4 process industry sectors – oil & gas, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and consumer products.