From News to Knowledge: Leveraging AI and Knowledge Graphs for Real-Time ESG Insights

Traditional Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) assessments rely heavily on corporate disclosures and third-party ratings, which are often delayed, inconsistent, and prone to bias. These limitations leave stakeholders without timely visibility into rapidly evolving ESG events. These assessment frameworks also fail to capture the dynamic nature of ESG issues reflected in public news media. This research addresses these limitations by proposing and implementing an automated framework utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Knowledge Graphs (KG), to analyse ESG news data for companies listed on major stock indices. The methodology involves several stages: collecting a registry of target companies; retrieving relevant news articles; applying Named Entity Recognition (NER), sentiment analysis, and ESG domain classification; and constructing a linked property knowledge graph to structure the extracted information semantically. The framework culminates in an interactive dashboard for visualising and querying the resulting graph database. The resulting knowledge graph supports comparative inferential analytics across indices and sectors, uncovering divergent ESG sentiment profiles and thematic priorities that traditional reports overlook. The analysis also reveals comparative insights into sentiment trends and ESG focus areas across different exchanges and sectors, offering perspectives often missing from traditional methods. Findings indicate differing ESG sentiment profiles and thematic focuses between the UK (FTSE) and Australian (ASX) indices within the analysed dataset. This study confirms AI/KG’s potential for a modular, dynamic, and semantically rich ESG intelligence approach, transforming unstructured news into interconnected insights. Limitations and areas for future work, including model refinement and integration of financial data, are also discussed. This proposed framework augments traditional ESG evaluations with automated, scalable, and context-rich analysis.