Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) perspectives have become integral to corporate decision-making and investment, with global regulatory mandates for ESG disclosure. The reliability of ESG ratings, crucial for assessing corporate sustainability practices, is compromised by inconsistencies and discrepancies across and within rating agencies, casting doubt on their effectiveness in reflecting true ESG performance and impact on firm valuations. While there have been studies using ESG-related news articles to measure their effect on stock trading, none have studied the Indonesian stock market. To address this gap, we developed a text similarity framework to identify ESG-related news articles based on Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Standards without the need for manual annotations. Using news articles from one of the prominent business media outlets in Indonesia and an event study method, we found that 17.9% out of 18,431 environment-related news are followed by increased stock trading on the firms mentioned in the news, compared to 16.0% on random-dates datasets of the same size and firm composition. This approach is intended as a simpler alternative to building an ESG-specific news labeling model or using third-party data providers, although further analyses may be required to evaluate its robustness.

We compare three solutions to UKARA 1.0 challenge on automated short-answer scoring: single classical, ensemble classical, and deep learning. The task is to classify given answers to two questions, whether they are right or wrong. While recent development shows increasing model complexity to push the benchmark performances, they tend to be resource-demanding with mundane improvement. For the UKARA task, we found that bag-of-words and classical machine learning approaches can compete with ensemble models and Bi-LSTM model with pre-trained word2vec embedding from 200 million words. In this case, the single classical machine learning achieved less than 2% difference in F1 compared to the deep learning approach with 1/18 time for model training.