To accurately assess the dynamic impact of a company’s activities on its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores, we have initiated a series of shared tasks, named ML-ESG. These tasks adhere to the MSCI guidelines for annotating news articles across various languages. This paper details the third iteration of our series, ML-ESG-3, with a focus on impact duration inference—a task that poses significant challenges in estimating the enduring influence of events, even for human analysts. In ML-ESG-3, we provide datasets in five languages (Chinese, English, French, Korean, and Japanese) and share insights from our experience in compiling such subjective datasets. Additionally, this paper reviews the methodologies proposed by ML-ESG-3 participants and offers a comparative analysis of the models’ performances. Concluding the paper, we introduce the concept for the forthcoming series of shared tasks, namely multi-lingual ESG promise verification, and discuss its potential contributions to the field.

Our team participated in the multi-lingual Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) classification task, focusing on datasets in three languages: English, French, and Japanese. This study leverages Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), with a particular emphasis on the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) framework, to analyze sentence and document structures across these varied linguistic datasets. The team’s experimentation with diverse PLM-based network designs facilitated a nuanced comparative analysis within this multi-lingual context. For each language-specific dataset, different BERT-based transformer models were trained and evaluated. Notably, in the experimental results, the RoBERTa-Base model emerged as the most effective in official evaluation, particularly in the English dataset, achieving a micro-F1 score of 58.82 %, thereby demonstrating superior performance in classifying ESG impact levels. This research highlights the adaptability and effectiveness of PLMs in tackling the complexities of multi-lingual ESG classification tasks, underscoring the exceptional performance of the Roberta Base model in processing English-language data.

Assessing a company’s sustainable development goes beyond just financial metrics; the inclusion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors is becoming increasingly vital. The ML-ESG shared task series seeks to pioneer discussions on news-driven ESG ratings, drawing inspiration from the MSCI ESG rating guidelines. In its second edition, ML-ESG-2 emphasizes impact type identification, offering datasets in four languages: Chinese, English, French, and Japanese. Of the 28 teams registered, 8 participated in the official evaluation. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of ML-ESG-2, detailing the dataset specifics and summarizing the performance outcomes of the participating teams.