Towards Robust ESG Analysis Against Greenwashing Risks: Aspect-Action Analysis with Cross-Category Generalization

Sustainability reports are key for evaluating companies' environmental, social and governance, ESG performance, but their content is increasingly obscured by greenwashing - sustainability claims that are misleading, exaggerated, and fabricated. Yet, existing NLP approaches for ESG analysis lack robustness against greenwashing risks, often extracting insights that reflect misleading or exaggerated sustainability claims rather than objective ESG performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce A3CG - Aspect-Action Analysis with Cross-Category Generalization, as a novel dataset to improve the robustness of ESG analysis amid the prevalence of greenwashing. By explicitly linking sustainability aspects with their associated actions, A3CG facilitates a more fine-grained and transparent evaluation of sustainability claims, ensuring that insights are grounded in verifiable actions rather than vague or misleading rhetoric. Additionally, A3CG emphasizes cross-category generalization. This ensures robust model performance in aspect-action analysis even when companies change their reports to selectively favor certain sustainability areas. Through experiments on A3CG, we analyze state-of-the-art supervised models and LLMs, uncovering their limitations and outlining key directions for future research.

ESGSenticNet: A Neurosymbolic Knowledge Base for Corporate Sustainability Analysis

Evaluating corporate sustainability performance is essential to drive sustainable business practices, amid the need for a more sustainable economy. However, this is hindered by the complexity and volume of corporate sustainability data (i.e. sustainability disclosures), not least by the effectiveness of the NLP tools used to analyse them. To this end, we identify three primary challenges - immateriality, complexity, and subjectivity, that exacerbate the difficulty of extracting insights from sustainability disclosures. To address these issues, we introduce ESGSenticNet, a publicly available knowledge base for sustainability analysis. ESGSenticNet is constructed from a neurosymbolic framework that integrates specialised concept parsing, GPT-4o inference, and semi-supervised label propagation, together with a hierarchical taxonomy. This approach culminates in a structured knowledge base of 44k knowledge triplets - ('halve carbon emission', supports, 'emissions control'), for effective sustainability analysis. Experiments indicate that ESGSenticNet, when deployed as a lexical method, more effectively captures relevant and actionable sustainability information from sustainability disclosures compared to state of the art baselines. Besides capturing a high number of unique ESG topic terms, ESGSenticNet outperforms baselines on the ESG relatedness and ESG action orientation of these terms by 26% and 31% respectively. These metrics describe the extent to which topic terms are related to ESG, and depict an action toward ESG. Moreover, when deployed as a lexical method, ESGSenticNet does not require any training, possessing a key advantage in its simplicity for non-technical stakeholders.

FinXABSA: Explainable Finance through Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

This paper presents a novel approach for explainability in financial analysis by utilizing the Pearson correlation coefficient to establish a relationship between aspect-based sentiment analysis and stock prices. The proposed methodology involves constructing an aspect list from financial news articles and analyzing sentiment intensity scores for each aspect. These scores are then compared to the stock prices for the relevant companies using the Pearson coefficient to determine any significant correlations. The results indicate that the proposed approach provides a more detailed and accurate understanding of the relationship between sentiment analysis and stock prices, which can be useful for investors and financial analysts in making informed decisions. Additionally, this methodology offers a transparent and interpretable way to explain the sentiment analysis results and their impact on stock prices. Overall, the findings of this paper demonstrate the importance of explainability in financial analysis and highlight the potential benefits of utilizing the Pearson coefficient for analyzing aspect-based sentiment analysis and stock prices. The proposed approach offers a valuable tool for understanding the complex relationships between financial news sentiment and stock prices, providing a new perspective on the financial market and aiding in making informed investment decisions.