A Modular Framework for ESG Prediction through Domain-Specific Language Modeling and Graph Learning

원문 초록

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores are increasingly used to evaluate corporate sustainability, supporting investment decisions, ensuring regulatory compliance and assessing risk. However, current ESG evaluations largely rely on proprietary methodologies that often produce inconsistent ratings. This motivates the development of data-driven prediction frameworks. In this paper, we present ESGPred, a modular framework for predicting ESG scores by combining domain-specific language modeling with graph-based learning over a network that models the relationships among the companies being evaluated. In addition to presenting the rationale behind ESGPred and detailing its ESG score prediction process, we show that ESGPred can effectively predict both overall ESG ratings and their individual Environmental, Social, and Governance components. We evaluated ESGPred using a dataset of 5,266 sustainability reports published by 2,134 publicly listed companies between 2020 and 2023. In this evaluation, we used ESG ratings provided by LSEG Data & Analytics as ground truth. Our experimental results demonstrated that integrating graph-based relational learning improves prediction performance over purely text-based baselines.