ESG-DocQA: A Three-Annotator Validated Dataset for Evidence-Grounded Question Answering over Corporate ESG Reports

ESG-DocQA is a 300-sample benchmark for evidence-grounded question answering over corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports. The dataset was constructed from page-level ESG report evidence and contains multi-step verification, comparison, and inference questions. The benchmark was produced through iterative human review and three-annotator validation, achieving substantial inter-annotator reliability (Fleiss' kappa = 0.644; Krippendorff's alpha = 0.647). The three trained graduate-student peer annotators independently used Annotation Guidelines v2 and did not participate in candidate question-answer generation. The final dataset contains 300 validated samples with domain distribution E=145, S=91, G=64 and answer-type distribution verification=127, comparison=106, inference=67. The repository includes benchmark JSONL records, data dictionary and metadata, annotation guidelines, validation reports, adjudication and replacement logs, source-report manifests, prompts, reproducibility scripts, and the current SCIE/IJDAR submission package. Original ESG report source PDFs and rendered page images are not redistributed due to copyright considerations. Users can locate source reports using the provided source-report manifest and page-level metadata.