Tracking Changes in ESG Representation: Initial Investigations in UK Annual Reports

Matthew Purver, Matej Martinc, Riste Ichev, Igor Lončarski, Katarina Sitar Šuštar, Aljoša Valentinčič, Senja Pollak


Abstract
We describe initial work into analysing the language used around environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues in UK company annual reports. We collect a dataset of annual reports from UK FTSE350 companies over the years 2012-2019; separately, we define a categorized list of core ESG terms (single words and multi-word expressions) by combining existing lists with manual annotation. We then show that this list can be used to analyse the changes in ESG language in the dataset over time, via a combination of language modelling and distributional modelling via contextual word embeddings. Initial findings show that while ESG discussion in annual reports is becoming significantly more likely over time, the increase varies with category and with individual terms, and that some terms show noticeable changes in usage.
Anthology ID:
2022.csrnlp-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Computing Social Responsibility Workshop within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
CSRNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
9–14
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.csrnlp-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthew Purver, Matej Martinc, Riste Ichev, Igor Lončarski, Katarina Sitar Šuštar, Aljoša Valentinčič, and Senja Pollak. 2022. Tracking Changes in ESG Representation: Initial Investigations in UK Annual Reports. In Proceedings of the First Computing Social Responsibility Workshop within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 9–14, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Tracking Changes in ESG Representation: Initial Investigations in UK Annual Reports (Purver et al., CSRNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.csrnlp-1.2.pdf