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Civitas Outlook
Topic
Economic Dynamism
Published on
Jul 1, 2025
Contributors
Carola Binder
Nicole Baerg
Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash

Automated Detection of Emotion in Central Bank Communication: A Warning

Contributors
Carola Binder
Carola Binder
Senior Fellow
Carola Binder
Nicole Baerg
Nicole Baerg
Nicole Baerg
Summary
Can LLMs help us better understand the role of emotion in central bank communication?
Summary
Can LLMs help us better understand the role of emotion in central bank communication?
Listen to this article

Abstract

Central banks have increased their official communications. Previous literature measures complexity, clarity, tone and sentiment. Less explored is the use of fact versus emotion in central bank communication. We test a new method for classifying factual versus emotional language, applying a pretrained transfer learning model, fine-tuned with manually coded, task-specific and domain-specific data sets. We find that the large language models outperform traditional models on some occasions; however, the results depend on a number of choices. We therefore caution researchers from depending solely on such models even for tasks that appear similar. Our findings suggest that central bank communications are not only technically but also subjectively difficult to understand.

Read the full paper at the National Institute Economic Review (published online by Cambridge University Press).

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