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Ornithologist: Towards Trustworthy "Reasoning" about Central Bank Communications

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  • Dominic Zaun Eu Jones

Abstract

I develop Ornithologist, a weakly-supervised textual classification system and measure the hawkishness and dovishness of central bank text. Ornithologist uses ``taxonomy-guided reasoning'', guiding a large language model with human-authored decision trees. This increases the transparency and explainability of the system and makes it accessible to non-experts. It also reduces hallucination risk. Since it requires less supervision than traditional classification systems, it can more easily be applied to other problems or sources of text (e.g. news) without much modification. Ornithologist measurements of hawkishness and dovishness of RBA communication carry information about the future of the cash rate path and of market expectations.

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  • Dominic Zaun Eu Jones, 2025. "Ornithologist: Towards Trustworthy "Reasoning" about Central Bank Communications," Papers 2505.09083, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2505.09083
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    1. Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Tho Pham & Oleksandr Talavera, 2023. "The Voice of Monetary Policy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 113(2), pages 548-584, February.
    2. Stefano Nardelli & David Martens & Ellen Tobback, 2017. "Between hawks and doves: measuring Central Bank Communication," IFC Bulletins chapters, in: Bank for International Settlements (ed.), Big Data, volume 44, Bank for International Settlements.
    3. Tobback, Ellen & Nardelli, Stefano & Martens, David, 2017. "Between hawks and doves: measuring central bank communication," Working Paper Series 2085, European Central Bank.
    4. Mcmahon, Michael & Naylor, Matthew, 2023. "Getting through: Communicating complex information," CEPR Discussion Papers 18537, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    5. David O. Lucca & Francesco Trebbi, 2009. "Measuring Central Bank Communication: An Automated Approach with Application to FOMC Statements," NBER Working Papers 15367, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Leonardo Gambacorta & Byeungchun Kwon & Taejin Park & Pietro Patelli & Sonya Zhu, 2024. "CB-LMs: language models for central banking," BIS Working Papers 1215, Bank for International Settlements.
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