Predicting Company ESG Ratings from News Articles Using Multivariate Timeseries Analysis

In recent years, corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) engagement has received significant public attention. As mandatory ESG reporting is increasingly adopted and investors place greater emphasis on sustainability in their decisions, the demand for transparent and reliable ESG ratings is growing. However, existing automatic approaches to ESG rating prediction remain limited. Many rely on traditional machine learning methods like random forests or social network analysis, rather than leveraging incoming news article streams and large multivariate time series data, which, for the first time, enables capturing the dynamic relationships between topics, sentiments, and events. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to predicting ESG ratings from news articles by uniquely combining multivariate time series construction with advanced deep learning techniques. We create an extensive dataset of 3.7 million news articles spanning three years and covering 3,000 U.S. companies, providing a robust foundation for training and evaluating our approach. Our approach achieves high accuracy and outperforms existing approaches, underscoring its potential as a scalable, data-driven solution for ESG rating prediction.