Mishra, Mridul
Measuring Sustainability Intention of ESG Fund Disclosure using Few-Shot Learning
Singh, Mayank, Nafis, Nazia, Kumar, Abhijeet, Mishra, Mridul
Global sustainable fund universe encompasses open-end funds and exchange-traded funds (ETF) that, by prospectus or other regulatory filings, claim to focus on Environment, Social and Governance (ESG). Challengingly, the claims can only be confirmed by examining the textual disclosures to check if there is presence of intentionality and ESG focus on its investment strategy. Currently, there is no regulation to enforce sustainability in ESG products space. This paper proposes a unique method and system to classify and score the fund prospectuses in the sustainable universe regarding specificity and transparency of language. We aim to employ few-shot learners to identify specific, ambiguous, and generic sustainable investment-related language. Additionally, we construct a ratio metric to determine language score and rating to rank products and quantify sustainability claims for US sustainable universe. As a by-product, we publish manually annotated quality training dataset on Hugging Face (ESG-Prospectus-Clarity-Category under cc-by-nc-sa-4.0) of more than 1K ESG textual statements. The performance of the few-shot finetuning approach is compared with zero-shot models e.g., Llama-13B, GPT 3.5 Turbo etc. We found that prompting large language models are not accurate for domain specific tasks due to misalignment issues. The few-shot finetuning techniques outperform zero-shot models by large margins of more than absolute ~30% in precision, recall and F1 metrics on completely unseen ESG languages (test set). Overall, the paper attempts to establish a systematic and scalable approach to measure and rate sustainability intention quantitatively for sustainable funds using texts in prospectus. Regulatory bodies, investors, and advisors may utilize the findings of this research to reduce cognitive load in investigating or screening of ESG funds which accurately reflects the ESG intention.
Holder Recommendations using Graph Representation Learning & Link Prediction
Saxena, Rachna, Kumar, Abhijeet, Mishra, Mridul
Lead recommendations for financial products such as funds or ETF is potentially challenging in investment space due to changing market scenarios, and difficulty in capturing financial holder's mindset and their philosophy. Current methods surface leads based on certain product categorization and attributes like returns, fees, category etc. to suggest similar product to investors which may not capture the holder's investment behavior holistically. Other reported works does subjective analysis of institutional holder's ideology. This paper proposes a comprehensive data driven framework for developing a lead recommendations system in holder's space for financial products like funds by using transactional history, asset flows and product specific attributes. The system assumes holder's interest implicitly by considering all investment transactions made and collects possible meta information to detect holder's investment profile/persona like investment anticipation and investment behavior. This paper focusses on holder recommendation component of framework which employs a bi-partite graph representation of financial holders and funds using variety of attributes and further employs GraphSage model for learning representations followed by link prediction model for ranking recommendation for future period. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with baseline model i.e., content-based filtering approach on metric hits at Top-k (50, 100, 200) recommendations. We found that the proposed graph ML solution outperform baseline by absolute 42%, 22% and 14% with a look ahead bias and by absolute 18%, 19% and 18% on completely unseen holders in terms of hit rate for top-k recommendations: 50, 100 and 200 respectively.