ESG2PreEM: Automated ESG grade assessment framework using pre-trained ensemble models

Incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria is essential for promoting sustainability in business and is considered a set of principles that can increase a firm's value. This research proposes a strategy using text-based automated techniques to rate ESG. For autonomous classification, data were collected from the news archive LexisNexis and classified as E, S, or G based on the ESG materials provided by the Refinitiv-Sustainable Leadership Monitor, which has over 450 metrics. In addition, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), Robustly optimized BERT approach (RoBERTa), and A Lite BERT (ALBERT) models were trained to accurately categorize preprocessed ESG documents using a voting ensemble model, and their performances were measured. The accuracy of the ensemble model utilizing BERT and ALBERT was found to be 80.79% with batch size 20. Additionally, this research validated the performance of the framework for companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and compared it with the grade provided by Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), a globally renowned ESG rating agency known for having the highest creditworthiness. This study supports the use of sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) techniques to attain important knowledge from large amounts of text-based data to improve ESG assessment criteria established by different rating agencies.