@inproceedings{li-etal-2024-evaluating-multilingual,
    title = "Evaluating Multilingual Language Models for Cross-Lingual {ESG} Issue Identification",
    author = "Li, Wing Yan  and
      Chersoni, Emmanuele  and
      Ngai, Cindy Sing Bik",
    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-1.6",
    pages = "50--58",
    abstract = "The automation of information extraction from ESG reports has recently become a topic of increasing interest in the Natural Language Processing community. While such information is highly relevant for socially responsible investments, identifying the specific issues discussed in a corporate social responsibility report is one of the first steps in an information extraction pipeline. In this paper, we evaluate methods for tackling the Multilingual Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Issue Identification Task. Our experiments use existing datasets in English, French and Chinese with a unified label set. Leveraging multilingual language models, we compare two approaches that are commonly adopted for the given task: off-the-shelf and fine-tuning. We show that fine-tuning models end-to-end is more robust than off-the-shelf methods. Additionally, translating text into the same language has negligible performance benefits.",
}

The automation of information extraction from ESG reports has recently become a topic of increasing interest in the Natural Language Processing community. While such information is highly relevant for socially responsible investments, identifying the specific issues discussed in a corporate social responsibility report is one of the first steps in an information extraction pipeline. In this paper, we evaluate methods for tackling the Multilingual Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Issue Identification Task. Our experiments use existing datasets in English, French and Chinese with a unified label set. Leveraging multilingual language models, we compare two approaches that are commonly adopted for the given task: off-the-shelf and fine-tuning. We show that fine-tuning models end-to-end is more robust than off-the-shelf methods. Additionally, translating text into the same language has negligible performance benefits.
Li, Wing Yan Chersoni, Emmanuele Ngai, Cindy Sing Bik
Evaluating Multilingual Language Models for Cross-Lingual ESG Issue Identification