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Evaluating Multilingual Language Models for Cross-Lingual ESG Issue Identification

The automation of information extraction from ESG reports has recently become a topic of increasing interest in the Natural Language Processing community. While such information is highly relevant for socially responsible investments, identifying the specific issues discussed in a corporate social responsibility report is one of the first steps in an information extraction pipeline. In this paper, we evaluate methods for tackling the Multilingual Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Issue Identification Task. Our experiments use existing datasets in English, French and Chinese with a unified label set. Leveraging multilingual language models, we compare two approaches that are commonly adopted for the given task: off-the-shelf and fine-tuning. We show that fine-tuning models end-to-end is more robust than off-the-shelf methods. Additionally, translating text into the same language has negligible performance benefits.