Environmental, Social and Governance Sentiment Analysis on Slovene News: A Novel Dataset and Models

Paula Dodig, Boshko Koloski, Katarina Sitar Šuštar, Senja Pollak, Matthew Purver


Abstract
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations are increasingly integral to assessing corporate performance, reputation, and long-term sustainability. Yet, reliable ESG ratings remain limited for smaller companies and emerging markets. We introduce the first publicly available Slovene ESG sentiment dataset and a suite of models for automatic ESG sentiment detection. The dataset, derived from the MaCoCu Slovene news collection, combines large language model (LLM)-assisted filtering with human annotation of company-related ESG content. We evaluate the performance of monolingual (SloBERTa) and multilingual (XLM-R) models, embedding-based classifiers (TabPFN), hierarchical ensemble architectures, and large language models. Results show that LLMs achieve the strongest performance on Environmental (Gemma3-27B, F1-macro: 0.61) and Social aspects (gpt-oss 20B, F1-macro: 0.45), while fine-tuned SloBERTa is the best model on Governance classification (F1-macro: 0.54). We then show in a small case study how the best-preforming classifier (gpt-oss) can be applied to investigate ESG aspects for selected companies across a long time frame.
Anthology ID:
2026.fnp-1.5
Volume:
The 7th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Mo El-Haj, Antonio Moreno Sandoval, Ana Garcia-Serrano, Chung-Chi Chen, Paul Rayson, Yanco Amor Torterolo Orta, Paloma Martinez, Jordi Porta
Venues:
FNP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
49–58
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-fnp-05
DOI:
10.63317/2j2jz8zyoh4t
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paula Dodig, Boshko Koloski, Katarina Sitar Šuštar, Senja Pollak, and Matthew Purver. 2026. Environmental, Social and Governance Sentiment Analysis on Slovene News: A Novel Dataset and Models. In The 7th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop, pages 49–58, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Environmental, Social and Governance Sentiment Analysis on Slovene News: A Novel Dataset and Models (Dodig et al., FNP 2026)
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