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
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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.