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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Predicting the impact of central bank communications on financial market investors' interest rate expectations</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Andy Moniz</string-name>
          <email>moniz@rsm.nl</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Franciska de Jong</string-name>
          <email>f.m.g.dejong@utwente.nl</email>
          <email>fdejong@eshcc.eur.nl</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Erasmus Studio, Erasmus University</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Rotterdam</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="NL">The Netherlands</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Human Media Interaction, University of Twente</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Enschede</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="NL">The Netherlands</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>In this paper, we design an automated system that predicts the impact of central bank communications on investors' interest rate expectations. Our corpus is the Bank of England's 'Monetary Policy Committee Minutes'. Prior studies suggest that effective communications can mitigate a financial crisis; ineffective communications may exacerbate one. The system described here works in four phases. First, the system detects salient aspects associated with economic growth, prices, interest rates and bank lending using information from Wikipedia. These economic aspects are detected using the TextRank link analysis algorithm. A multinomial Naive Bayesian model then classifies document sentences to these aspects. The second phase measures sentiment using a count of terms from the General Inquirer dictionary. The third phase employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to infer topic clusters that may acts as intensifiers/diminishers for the economic aspects. Finally, an ensemble tree combines the phases to predict the impact of the communications on financial market interest rates.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>sentiment analysis</kwd>
        <kwd>text mining</kwd>
        <kwd>link analysis</kwd>
        <kwd>financial markets</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>
        Post the global financial crisis, there has been a dramatic change in the use of central
bank communications as a central bank policy instrument [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref2">1,2</xref>
        ]. Central banks
communicate qualitative information to the financial market through statements, minutes,
speeches, and published reports [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ]. Communication is an important tool that a central
bank can use to avert a crisis, by providing investors with its assessment of the risks
and the measures it views as necessary to reduce those risks within the economy [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ],
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ]. Previous studies suggest that effective central bank communications can mitigate
and potentially prevent a financial crisis; ineffective communications may exacerbate
one [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ], [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. In [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ], the Swedish central bank, the Riksbank, is criticized because its
communications were “not clear or strong enough” leading up to the global financial
crisis, such that the bank’s information went “unnoticed” [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. In this paper, we design
an automated system that predicts the impact of central bank communications on
interest rate expectations, as derived via financial market patterns. For the purposes of
this study, we analyze economic sentiment, as expressed in the ‘Monetary Policy
Committee Minutes' [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] published by the Bank of England, that details its monthly
interest rate decisions.
      </p>
      <p>
        Financial markets scrutinize central bank communications for “clues and shades of
meaning about its assessment of the economy and the direction of where economic
policy may be heading” [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. As a prediction task, the measurement and evaluation of
sentiment is challenging due to the complexities and subtleties of interpreting bank
communications [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. The formation of economic policy is a balancing act between
achieving high economic growth and financial stability, while targeting low inflation
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ]. The relative importance of these objectives is dynamic, and varies depending on
the prevailing economic conditions [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ]. For example under benign economic
conditions, high inflation may be construed by financial market investors as a negative
signal for the direction of future interest rates. During the financial crisis of
20072009, high inflation was considered to be a positive signal by effectively lowering
interest rates1 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]. This motivates a need for fine-grained sentiment analysis, to
automatically detect economic aspects and predict the central bank sentiment expressed
towards these aspects [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. Such a model would provide investors with an automated
system to decipher the complexities and interactions of economic aspects, to interpret
the consequences of these interactions for the future path of interest rates, and to
incorporate the information into their investment decisions. For a central bank, such a
model would provide it with the ability to predict the impact of its economic policies
on the financial markets. The resulting ‘price discovery’ process [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] may promote a
more efficient functioning of financial markets.
      </p>
      <p>
        Our approach consists of four phases. First, the system detects salient references to
economic aspects associated with economic growth, prices, interest rates and bank
lending and employs a multinomial Naive Bayesian model to classify sentences
within documents. Economic aspects are identified in a pre-processing step, that employs
a link analysis using the TextRank algorithm [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8 ref9">8,9</xref>
        ]. The second phase measures
sentiment expressed for the economic aspects, using a count of terms from the General
Inquirer dictionary [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ]. The third phase employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)
to infer intensifiers/diminishers that may change the meaning of the economic aspects
and economic sentiment [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ],[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. Specifically, the model categorizes whether the
magnitude of the economic aspects has ‘intensified’ or ‘diminished’ over time
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11 ref12">11,12</xref>
        ]. We refer to the resulting topic clusters as directional topic clusters. Finally,
an ensemble tree combines the model components to predict the impact of the
communications on financial market interest rates over the following day.
1 The real interest rate is the rate of interest a borrower expects to pay on debt after allowing for inflation
and is equal to the nominal interest rate (set by the central bank) minus the rate of inflation [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ]
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 draws on literature from the
fields of economics and discusses the implications for sentiment analysis and
keyword detection. Section 3 models the individual components of the system. Section 4
outlines the corpus of central bank communications, provides an evaluation of the
model components and then discusses the results. Section 5 concludes and suggests
avenues for future research.
2
2.1
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Related Work</title>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>Background: central bank research</title>
        <p>
          Post the financial crisis, several central banks have identified communications,
particularly ‘enhanced forward guidance’, as an important policy instrument within their
economic toolkit [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref2">1,2</xref>
          ]. Effective communications enhance a central bank’s public
transparency, accountability and credibility [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
          ], which in turn aids its ability to
implement economic policies [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
          ]. To date, there has been little research into text
mining of central bank communications. In [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
          ], the impact of different types of
communications (press releases, speeches, interviews, and news conferences) are analyzed to
determine which media sources impact interest rate expectations. The analysis does
not, however, classify the language used in the documents. In [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ], a term counting
approach is adopted to analyze the sentiment contained within the meeting minutes of
the US central bank (the Federal Reserve). In [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ] and [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
          ] Latent Semantic Analysis is
employed to analyze the sentiment contained within the Bank of Canada’s minutes.
The intention of this study is to design a fine-grained sentiment analysis approach to
analyze the impact of central bank communications on financial market investors. To
our knowledge, this remains an unexplored avenue of research.
2.2
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-2">
        <title>Background: sentiment analysis</title>
        <p>
          Traditionally, fine-grained sentiment analysis has been researched for the
classification of online user reviews of products and movies [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
          ]. Readers are often not only
interested in the general sentiment towards an aspect but also a detailed opinion
analysis for each of these aspects [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
          ]. Evaluation is conducted by comparing model
classifications versus ratings provided by users. The evaluation of economic sentiment is
arguably a harder task, due to the lack of a clearly defined outcome to assess model
performance. For example, which economic variable should a model’s predictions be
evaluated against? The relative importance of the aspects (e.g. economic growth/
inflation/interest rates) is subjective, may vary over time, and the measurement of the
aspects is only known with significant time delay.
        </p>
        <p>
          The traditional approach to text-mining within the field of finance is to count terms
using the General Inquirer dictionary [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17 ref18">17,18</xref>
          ]. The dictionary classifies words
according to multiple categories, including 1,915 positive words and 2,291 negative words.
The General Inquirer was developed for psychology and sociology research and
while it is used for text mining within the field of finance, little research has been
conducted as to its suitability within finance [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
          ]. Aspects that are frequently
mentioned in central bank communications, such as the terms ‘employment’,
‘unemployment’ and ‘growth’, are not classified by the General Inquirer dictionary. Adjectives
are often needed before investors can interpret the patterns in the economy to form
their interest rate expectations [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ]. Furthermore, the terms ‘inflation’ and ‘low’ are
classified as negative by the dictionary, yet ‘low inflation’ is a positive characteristic
and indeed achieving this is a central bank’s core objective [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
          ]. The terms ‘fall’ and
‘decline’ are classified as negative terms in the General Inquirer dictionary, yet the
opposite terms ‘rise’ and ‘increase’ are not classified at all.
2.3
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-3">
        <title>Background: keyword detection</title>
        <p>
          Graph-based algorithms have received much attention [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ] as an approach to keyphrase
extraction and are considered to be state-of-the-art unsupervised methods [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
          ]. In a
graph representation of a document, nodes are words or phrases, and edges represent
co-occurrence or semantic relations. The underlying assumption is that all words in
the text have some relationship to all other words in the text. Such an approach is
statistical, because it links all co-occurring terms without considering their meaning
or function in text. Centrality is often used to estimate the importance of a word in a
document [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
          ], and is a way of deciding on the importance of a vertex within a graph
that takes into account global information recursively computed from the entire graph,
rather than relying only on local vertex-specific information [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
          ]. The main advantage
of such a representation is that selected terms are independent of their language [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
          ].
3
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Model to predict changes in investors’ expectations</title>
      <p>
        In this section we describe the four phases of the system. First, the system detects
salient references to economic aspects and employs a multinomial Naive Bayesian
model to classify sentences within documents. The second phase measures sentiment
expressed for the economic aspects, using a count of terms from the General Inquirer
dictionary. The third phase employs a LDA model and categorizes whether the
magnitude of the economic aspects has ‘intensified’ or ‘diminished’ [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11 ref12">11,12</xref>
        ]. Finally, an
ensemble tree combines the model components to predict the impact of the
communications on financial market interest rates over the following day.
3.1
      </p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>Aspect detection</title>
        <p>
          In [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ] it is shown that tf-idf weighting selects infrequent terms that relate to major
news events or economic shocks. Our approach is intended to detect the common
economic themes that are discussed in central bank communications, that are more
likely to influence investors’ interest rate expectations on a day-to-day basis [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
          ]. To
determine salient references, we employ a link analysis approach that detects the most
frequently mentioned terms within two Wikipedia pages on Central Banking and
Inflation. The model employs TextRank [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ], a ranking algorithm based on the concept
of eigenvector centrality, to compute the importance of the nodes in the graph. Each
vertex corresponds to a word. A weight, wij, is assigned to the edge connecting the
two vertices, vi and vj. The goal is to compute the score of each vertex, which reflects
its importance, and use the word types that correspond to the highest scored vertices
to form keywords for the text [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
          ]. The score for vi, S(vi), is initialized with a default
value and is computed in an iterative manner until convergence using recursive
formula shown in Equation (1).
(1)
where Adj(vi) denotes vi’s neighbors and d is the damping factor set to 0.85 [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ].
Figure 1 displays the resulting clustering of terms. The size of each node is directly
proportional to the TextRank score of the respective economic aspect.
        </p>
        <p>
          We define economic aspects by employing a greedy algorithm to detect
communities of terms within the network [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref31">31</xref>
          ]. The economic growth aspect detects the
frequency of the terms: ‘demand’, ‘goods’, ‘services’, ‘investment’. The prices aspect
detects the terms: ‘inflation’, ‘prices’ , ‘money’, ‘markets’, ‘currency’. The interest
rate aspect detects the occurrence of: ‘interest’, ‘rates’, ‘policy’ and a bank lending
aspect detects the terms: ‘banks’, ‘lending’ and ‘assets’. It is not surprising to see
these terms appear in the link analysis, given a central bank’s remit is to maintain
price and financial stability. The choice of terms is consistent with the text mining
research of [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ] which identifies 'growth', 'price', 'rate', and 'econom' as the most
frequently occurring terms for the US economy. Using the four economic aspects, the
system employs a multinomial Naive Bayesian model [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
          ] to categorize sentences
within each document. The resulting classification labels form the basis upon which
sentiment analysis is applied.
3.2
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>Polarity detection</title>
        <p>
          In the second phase, the model computes a measure of economic sentiment associated
with each of the economic aspects. We measure polarity by counting the number of
positive (P) versus negative (N) terms, (P − N)/(P + N) identified using the General
Inquirer dictionary [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
          ]. In line with [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
          ], our goal is not to show that a term counting
method can perform as well as a Machine Learning method, but to provide a baseline
methodology to measure central bank sentiment and to draw attention to the
limitations of the approach that is widely adopted by text mining studies in the field of
finance as indicated in Section 2.2. The sentiment metrics that are associated with the
economic aspects: economic growth, prices, interest rate and bank lending are
labelled Tonegrowth, Toneprices, Toneinterest_rates and Tonebank_lending respectively. A fifth
sentiment metric, Toneoverall, is computed to measure the polarity associated with the
overall document, without conditioning upon the economic aspects. The five
sentiment metrics are included as separate components within the ensemble tree.
3.3
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-3">
        <title>Detection of LDA directional topic clusters</title>
        <p>
          Next we extend the baseline term-counting method by taking intensifiers and
diminishers into account [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11 ref12">11,12</xref>
          ]. These are terms that change the degree of the expressed
sentiment in a document (see Section 2.2). In the case of central bank
communications, the terms describe how economic aspects have changed over time. We employ
an implementation of LDA [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
          ], and represent each document as a probability
distribution over latent topics, where each topic is modeled by a probability distribution of
words. In [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
          ], LDA is found to capture the global topics in documents, to the extent
that topics do not represent ratable aspects associated with individual documents, but
define clusterings of the documents into specific types. For the purposes of training
the LDA model, we consider each sentence within each central bank communication
to be a separate document. This increases the sample size of the dataset (see Section
4.1) and is intended to improve the robustness of the LDA model for statistical
inference. We implement standard settings for LDA hyper-parameters, α = 50/K and
β=.01, where the number of topics K is set to 20 [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref25">25</xref>
          ]. We manually annotate two of
the topic clusters that capture ‘directional’ information [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          ] and appear to act as
intensifiers/diminishers of meaning. We label the clusters directional topic clusters. Table
1 identifies the top terms associated with the two clusters. Representative words are
the highest probability document terms for each topic cluster.
        </p>
        <p>Next for each central bank communication the LDA model infers the probabilities
associated with the ‘intensifier’ and ‘diminisher’ clusters within each of the three
economic aspects detected by the Naïve Bayesian classifier. The output of the model
is a vector of six topic probabilities that proxy the central bank’s assessment that the
economic aspects are intensifying/diminishing. We label the model directional LDA
model and the respective probability vectors: Topicgrowth , Topicprices ,
Topicinterest_rates and Topicbank_lending if the economic aspects are increasing and Topicgrowth ,
Topicprices , Topicinterest_rates and Topicbank_lending if the economic aspects are
decreasing. We include the topic probabilities as components within the ensemble tree.
4</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Experiments</title>
      <p>In this section we discuss the corpus of central bank communications and describe the
investor patterns data used to evaluate the impact of the central bank communications
on investors’ interest rate expectations. We then outline the evaluation of the
ensemble classification tree, present the results and provide a discussion.
4.1</p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>Data</title>
        <p>
          We choose to analyze the interest rate minutes of the Bank of England. As cited in
[
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ], central bank minutes are closely watched by investors to gauge the future
direction of economic policies. Similar datasets for the US and Canadian central banks’
minutes are examined in [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ] and [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
          ]. The Bank of England announces the level of
UK interest rates on the first Thursday of every month. The details that underpin this
decision are only provided two weeks later and are published in the Bank of
England’s ‘Monetary Policy Committee Minutes’. The communications are interesting to
analyze, because changes in investors’ expectations on the day of the central bank
communication may be attributed to the qualitative information contained within the
meeting minutes rather than the interest rate decision announced two weeks before.
Minutes typically include summaries of committee members’ views on economic
conditions and discuss the rationale for their interest rate decisions [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">26</xref>
          ]. The central
bank’s minutes are, on average, 12 pages long (including a header page), and contain
around 55 bullet points, typically with 5 sentences in each bullet. The documents are
available from 1997, the year when Parliament voted to give the Bank of England
operational independence from the UK government. We retrieve all meeting minutes
available between July 1997-March 20142 to create a corpus that consists of 199
documents. For the purposes of aspect detection and to train the LDA model, we remove
the header page and define a document as an individual sentence within each of the
meeting minutes. This expands the corpus to a collection of 53,195 documents.
        </p>
        <p>
          To evaluate the ensemble tree’s predictions we utilize information obtained from
financial market patterns. Interest rate futures contracts are financial instruments that
enable investors to insure against or speculate on uncertainty about the future level of
interest rates [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">27</xref>
          ]. Changes in the price of the futures contracts therefore reflect
changes in investors’ views on the future direction in central bank interest rates.
Investors’ interest rate expectations for the following three, six and twelve months are
derived and published daily by the Bank of England. We utilize investors’ twelve
month ahead forecasts. This data series has the greatest data coverage compared to the
three and six month series. Furthermore, the twelve month forecast horizon is
consistent with the time horizon over which that the Bank of England conducts its
economic policies [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
          ]. To isolate the effect of the central bank communication on
investors’ expectations, we compute the percentage change in the interest rate futures
contract, as measured from the close of business on the day of the communication
announcement until the close of business one day after. This narrow time window helps
to minimize the influence on investors’ interest rate expectations from other financial
market factors that may occur at the same time [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref28">28</xref>
          ].
4.2
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-2">
        <title>Experiment setup</title>
        <p>
          We design the evaluation of the prediction model in stages to enhance our
understanding of the model components. For a baseline, we evaluate the system’s predictions by
using only the tone of the overall document (see Section 3.2). The approach does not
take into account individual economic aspects or diminishers/intensifiers [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11 ref12">11,12</xref>
          ]. We
label the model naïve tone. This approach is consistent with the methodology adopted
by the financial literature [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
          ]. Next we compare the outcomes of an ensemble model
that combines the tone associated with each of the economic aspects: economic
growth, inflation and interest rates (see Section 3.2). We label this the economic
aspects model. A third model compares the outcomes from an ensemble model that
combines the tone of eight directional economic aspects, that combines the
intensifiers/diminishers associated with the four economic aspects (see Section 3.3). We label
this the directional LDA model. Finally, we combine the components in a single
ensemble tree and refer to the system as the joint aspect-polarity model.
        </p>
        <p>
          Learning and prediction is performed using an ensemble tree. The goal of ensemble
methods is to combine the predictions of several models built with a given learning
algorithm in order to improve generalizability and robustness over a single model. We
use the Random Forest algorithm [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref30">30</xref>
          ], that employs a diverse set of classifiers by
introducing randomness into the classifier construction. Experiments were validated
2
        </p>
        <p>
          Central bank communications announced in August 1997 were excluded from the analysis because the
communication document was not readily available in a machine readable format.
using five-fold cross validation in which the dataset is broken into five equal sized
sets; the classifier is trained on four datasets and tested on the remaining dataset. The
process is repeated five times and we calculate the average across folds. For
evaluation, we select Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squared Error and
Spearman’s rho (ρ). We also examine Spearman's rho since prediction may be considered
to be a ranking task. The formulae are displayed in Equation (2) below.
(2)
where Ei is the model’s predicted value, Oi is the realized value, and n is the number
of observations. MAE measures the average magnitude of the forecast errors without
considering direction; RMSE penalizes errors and gives a relatively high weight to
large errors. A smaller value of MAE or RMSE indicates a more accurate prediction.
Spearman's rho is a non-parametric measure of the degree of linear association
between the predicted and realized values, and is bound between the range -1 to +1 [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref29">29</xref>
          ].
A positive Spearman's rho indicates the model’s predictive ability; a negative value
indicates a poor model fit.
4.3
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-3">
        <title>Experiment results</title>
        <p>The evaluation metrics from the model components are shown in Table 2.</p>
        <p>Model</p>
        <p>
          The naïve tone model, which is similar to the approach commonly adopted by text
mining studies in the field of finance, shows the worst performance. It exhibits the
highest MAE and RMSE. The rank correlation of the model’s forecasts with realized
changes in investors’ interest rate expectations is negative and is highly statistically
negative, implying that documents that are predicted to have a positive/negative
impact on investors’ interest rate expectations end up having the reverse effect. The
economic aspects and directional LDA models exhibit monotonic decreases in MAE
and RMSE, suggesting a slight improvement in the model fit. Spearman’s rho,
however, is again negative, albeit to a lesser extent. Finally, the joint aspect-polarity
model, that includes all model components in the ensemble tree, displays the lowest MAE
and RMSE. The mildly positive Spearman’s rho is consistent with previous studies
within the field of finance. As cited in [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
          ], many factors influence the financial
markets; a low, positive correlation provides sufficient comfort of the model’s predictive
power.
4.4
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-4">
        <title>Discussion</title>
        <p>One interpretation of the experiment results is that multiple aspects are needed to
improve the accuracy of the system. The positive Spearman’s rho for the joint model
versus the negative Spearman’s rho for the naïve tone, economic aspects and
directional LDA models may be indicative of a non-linear relationship between the
components that is only evident when the models are combined rather than considered in
isolation. One of the strengths of a regression tree is that it does not assume a
functional form, allowing it to detect interactions between model components. To aid our
understanding of prediction in the joint model, Figure 2 displays the decision tree
results for one of the folds. The values in the grey boxes provide the predicted
percentage change in investors’ interest rate expectations associated with the sentiment
contained within the central bank communication. A positive value indicates that the
impact is expected to lead to an increase in investors’ interest rate expectations, while
a negative value indicates an expected decrease in interest rate expectations.</p>
        <p>The regression tree identifies the interaction between the directional topic clusters
and Tone measures. The primary decision in the decision tree is central bank
sentiment towards economic growth. The right hand path indicates that if a central bank
communication emphasizes positive economic growth and discusses interest rate
increases, the model predicts that investors’ expectations of future interest rates will
rise by 3%. The left hand path predicts that if a central bank tone towards economic
growth is low, declining bank lending and the tone towards interest rates is negative,
investors will reduce their expectations of future interest rates by 4%.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Conclusion</title>
      <p>
        The goal of central bank communication is to make messages as clear, simple and
understandable as possible to a wide range of audiences [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. In this study, we focus of
one specific audience, namely financial market investors. Investors play a key role for
the implementation of a central bank’s economic policies [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref2">1,2</xref>
        ]. The outcome of our
study may feed the design of a system that can predict the impact of central bank
communication on formation of investors’ interest rate expectations. The results of
the joint aspect-polarity model suggest that investors may benefit by incorporating a
measure of central bank sentiment to forecast interest rates.
      </p>
      <p>
        In this study we evaluate model performance using prices from financial market
instruments. The market price of an interest rate contract implicitly measures the
average investor's interest rate expectations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">27</xref>
        ]. It is also possible to compute an
'implied probability distribution' of those expectations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">27</xref>
        ]. In future work we plan to
evaluate a range of metrics, including the dispersion of the expectations as a proxy of
investor uncertainty. Post the 2007–09 financial crisis, central banks have broadened
the range of their communication, including the use of social media, live broadcasts,
podcasts and blogs, to deliver their messages quickly and efficiently [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. In future
research, a wider range of central bank communications, including those expressed
via social media, will be integrated into our study. We also intend to examine
alternative approaches to select economic aspects, including dynamic approaches that reflect
the usage of terms as central bank communications change over time.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>Acknowledgement</title>
      <p>The research leading to these results has partially been supported by the Dutch
national program COMMIT.</p>
    </sec>
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