Enhancing ESG Impact Type Identification through Early Fusion and Multilingual Models

Abstract: In the evolving landscape of Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) impact assessment, the ML-ESG-2 shared task proposes identifying ESG impact types. To address this challenge, we present a comprehensive system leveraging ensemble learning techniques, capitalizing on early and late fusion approaches. Our approach employs four distinct models: mBERT, FlauBERT-base, ALBERT-base-v2, and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) incorporating Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) features. Through extensive experimentation, we find that our early fusion ensemble approach, featuring the integration of LSA, TF-IDF, mBERT, FlauBERT-base, and ALBERT-base-v2, delivers the best performance. Our system offers a comprehensive ESG impact type identification solution, contributing to the responsible and sustainable decision-making processes vital in today's financial and corporate governance landscape.