Assessing socio-economic climate impacts from text data

News articles are an important source of information on disaster impacts and adaptation. A key methodological challenge in socio-environmental studies is how to select a representative data sample. Two approaches are common: querying news databases top-down with the aid of an existing disaster inventory or using NLP methods to cluster news texts bottom-up based on temporal and spatial features. Using a dataset of German news about landslides worldwide, we compare these approaches and discuss variations in event coverage. Such research design decision can influence the resulting news sample, affecting its use in studies of inequality in media coverage, disaster monitoring and inventory enrichment.

In recent years, text clustering has become a critical technique for applications including intent discovery, topic mining, and recommendation systems. However, evaluating text clustering algorithms remains challenging since many real-world textual datasets are not suitable for clustering assessment due to ambiguous semantic boundaries, the high dimensionality of embeddings, and inconsistent cluster structure. Current clustering dataset generators are designed for numerical data, providing limited support for text-specific benchmarking. This paper introduces TextClusterLab, a comprehensive framework for text clustering research. TextClusterLab offers a Large Language Model (LLM)-driven text clustering dataset generator to produce synthetic text datasets for evaluating clustering algorithms. This generator supports setting various clustering attributes, such as class imbalance, intra-cluster compactness, and inter-cluster diversity. These generated datasets can serve as practical benchmarks for testing the robustness and versatility of text clustering algorithms in diverse scenarios. Moreover, we introduce a benchmark to verify whether a text dataset is suitable for clustering evaluation. Therefore, TextClusterLab provides an integrated framework for reproducible and comprehensive text-specific clustering research. Our TextClusterLab is publicly available at https://github.com/research-paper-code/TextClusterLab, and some synthetic example datasets with various attributes are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/DW-irlab/TextClusterLab.

Understanding climate change requires reasoning over complex causal networks. Yet, existing causal discovery datasets predominantly capture explicit, direct causal relations. We introduce ClimateCause, a manually expert-annotated dataset of higher-order causal structures from science-for-policy climate reports, including implicit and nested causality. Cause-effect expressions are normalized and disentangled into individual causal relations to facilitate graph construction, with unique annotations for cause-effect correlation, relation type, and spatiotemporal context. We further demonstrate ClimateCause's value for quantifying readability based on the semantic complexity of causal graphs underlying a statement. Finally, large language model benchmarking on correlation inference and causal chain reasoning highlights the latter as a key challenge.