A Fed note scores central bank speeches from 119 countries with an LLM and with a word list

WanTing Xu and Diego Vilán published a FEDS Note at the Federal Reserve Board on 9 October 2026 that scores central bank speeches for hawkish or dovish tone in two ways. The corpus is the Bank for International Settlements’ database of central bankers’ speeches from 1996 to 2025, covering 119 countries.

A dictionary of 108 hawkish and 136 dovish terms gives one score per speech. Claude Haiku 4.5, reached through Anthropic’s API, gives the other on a scale from -1 to +1, with a confidence value and supporting excerpts. The appendix prints the full prompt and the full word list.

The two global series track each other until the 2008 financial crisis. Afterwards the dictionary measure stays dovish and the LLM measure returns toward neutral. For six economies the authors set the LLM series beside a semi-structural model’s estimate of the policy stance. The LLM series tends to turn first, with timing that varies by country and episode.

The global series is weighted by speech count, and seven central banks supply nearly half of the speeches. Crisis-hit Southeast Asian economies are underrepresented in the corpus during the Asian financial crisis. The note uses one model and reports no comparison across models.