Sustainability reporting has become an annual requirement in many countries and for certain types of companies. Sustainability reports inform stakeholders about companies’ commitment to sustainable development and their economic, social, and environmental sustainability practices. However, the fact that norms and standards allow a certain discretion to be adopted by drafting organizations makes such reports hardly comparable in terms of layout, disclosures, key performance indicators (KPIs), and so on. In this work, we present a system based on natural language processing and information extraction techniques to retrieve relevant information from sustainability reports, compliant with the Global Reporting Initiative Standards, written in Italian and English language. Specifically, the system is able to identify references to the various sustainability topics discussed by the reports: on which page of the document those references have been found, the context of each reference, and if it is mentioned positively or negatively. The output of the system has been then evaluated against a ground truth obtained through a manual annotation process on 134 reports. Experimental outcomes highlight the affordability of the approach for improving sustainability disclosures, accessibility, and transparency, thus empowering stakeholders to conduct further analysis and considerations.

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.

By examination of the high-frequency nouns, verbs, and keywords, the present study probes into the similarities and differences of corporate images represented in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports of China Mobile and Vodafone. The results suggest that: 1) both China Mobile and Vodafone prefer using some positive words, like improve, support and service to shape a positive, approachable and easy-going corporate image, and an image of prioritizing the environmental sustainability and the well-being of people; 2) CSR reports of China Mobile contain the keywords poverty and alleviation, which means China Mobile is pragmatic, collaborative and active to assume the responsibility for social events; 3) CSR reports of Vodafone contain keywords like privacy, women and global as well as some other countries, which shows Vodafone is enterprising, globalized and attentive to the development of women; 4) these differences might be related to the ideology and social culture of Chinese and British companies. This study may contribute to understanding the function of CSR report and offer helpful implications for broadening the research of corporate image.

We examine how Chinese and American oil companies use the gain- and loss-framed BUILDING source domain to legitimize their business in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports. Gain and loss frames can create legitimacy because they can ethically position an issue. We will focus on oil companies in China and the U.S. because different socio-cultural contexts in these two countries can potentially lead to different legitimation strategies in CSR reports, which can shed light on differences in Chinese and American CSR. All of the oil companies in our data are on the Fortune 500 list (2020). The results showed that Chinese oil companies used BUILDING metaphors more frequently than American oil companies. The most frequent keyword in Chinese CSRs “build” highlights environmental achievements in compliance with governments’ policies. American CSRs often used the metaphorical verb “support” to show their alignment with environmental policies and the interests of different stakeholders. The BUILDING source domain was used more often as gain frames in both Chinese and American CSR reports to show how oil companies create benefits for different stakeholders.

In this paper we show how aspect-based sentiment analysis might help public transport companies to improve their social responsibility for accessible travel. We present MobASA: a novel German-language corpus of tweets annotated with their relevance for public transportation, and with sentiment towards aspects related to barrier-free travel. We identified and labeled topics important for passengers limited in their mobility due to disability, age, or when travelling with young children. The data can be used to identify hurdles and improve travel planning for vulnerable passengers, as well as to monitor a perception of transportation businesses regarding the social inclusion of all passengers. The data is publicly available under: https://github.com/DFKI-NLP/sim3s-corpus

Social media is not just meant for entertainment, it provides platforms for sharing information, news, facts and events. In the digital age, activists and numerous users are seen to be vocal regarding human rights and their violations in social media. However, their voices do not often reach to the targeted audience and concerned human rights organization. In this work, we aimed at detecting factual posts in social media about violation of human rights in any part of the world. The end product of this research can be seen as an useful asset for different peacekeeping organizations who could exploit it to monitor real-time circumstances about any incident in relation to violation of human rights. We chose one of the popular micro-blogging websites, Twitter, for our investigation. We used supervised learning algorithms in order to build human rights violation identification (HRVI) models which are able to identify Tweets in relation to incidents of human right violation. For this, we had to manually create a data set, which is one of the contributions of this research. We found that our classification models that were trained on this gold-standard dataset performed excellently in classifying factual Tweets about human rights violation, achieving an accuracy of upto 93% on hold-out test set.

Inclusion, as one of the foundations in the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative, concerns the degree of being treated as an ingroup member in a workplace. Despite of its importance in a corporate’s ecosystem, the inclusion strategies and its performance are not adequately addressed in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and CSR reporting. This study proposes a machine learning and big data-based model to examine inclusion through the use of stereotype content in actual language use. The distribution of the stereotype content in general corpora of a given society is utilized as a baseline, with which texts about corporate texts are compared. This study not only propose a model to identify and classify inclusion in language use, but also provides insights to measure and track progress by including inclusion in CSR reports as a strategy to build an inclusive corporate team.

Pharmaceutical text classification is an important area of research for commercial and research institutions working in the pharmaceutical domain. Addressing this task is challenging due to the need of expert verified labelled data which can be expensive and time consuming to obtain. Towards this end, we leverage predictive coding methods for the task as they have been shown to generalise well for sentence classification. Specifically, we utilise GAN-BERT architecture to classify pharmaceutical texts. To capture the domain specificity, we propose to utilise the BioBERT model as our BERT model in the GAN-BERT framework. We conduct extensive evaluation to show the efficacy of our approach over baselines on multiple metrics.