About the SDG categories in Overton

Describes how policy documents are linked to different SDGs

Please note: this functionality was updated and improved in March 2025. If you would like more information on how we previously linked policy documents to SDGs there is more information here. 

As well as topics and subject areas Overton tries to map policy documents to one or more Sustainable Development Goals, which are a set of 17 goals set up by the United Nations to serve as a framework for global development. The SDGs are often used as a quick way to group policy or research relating to a particular problem area e.g. climate change, poverty or gender inequality. Each SDG is accompanied by targets which provide specific pathways to achieving the overall goal of a fairer and more sustainable world.

Overton uses an advanced multi-label approach, which allows a single classifier to predict multiple categories at the same time. This means our classifier can simultaneously categorize policy documents into multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their corresponding targets. As input it uses the new document descriptions and uses ModernBERT, a powerful language model known for its ability to understand the context of text, and organises the classification process hierarchically.

Each SDG is associated with a set of targets. For example SDG 8 “Decent work and economic growth” has 12 targets (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goal_8 ) including “Diversify, innovate and upgrade for economic productivity” (target 8.2)  and “Promote policies to support job creation and growing enterprises” (target 8.3). Our classifier first matches policy documents to these “targets” and then rolls them up to the parent SDG.   We created a large set of training data to ensure coverage of all targets, even for categories with limited data.

The performance of our classifier was evaluated using precision and recall, which measure how accurate and consistent the classifier’s predictions are. The results were very promising.