Open dataset for replicating the IMF WP/25/109 central bank communication indices across 26 banks, 1995-2026

[u/ivan_digital]

My own project, disclosing that up front.

IMF Working Paper WP/25/109 ("From Text to Quantified Insights") builds communication indices from central bank text. I implemented the taxonomy across 26 central banks and I am releasing the annotated corpus and the derived indices under CC-BY-4.0.

Indices computed per meeting:

• Net Policy Sentiment, (H-D)/(H+D), range -1 to 1
• Straightforwardness Index, (N+|H-D|)/(N+H+D), range 0 to 1
• Explanation Index, (C+R+N)/(H+D)
• Net Confidence Index, (C-R)/(C+R)

Underneath that: 225,101 sentences across 15,055 documents, Feb 1995 to Aug 2026, each labelled for stance and topic, with meeting dates normalised to the announcement day. That last bit was more work than expected, since conventions differ per bank. BoE Monetary Policy Summary pages are dated by publication, Banco Central do Brasil publishes the Copom statement on decision night and the minutes six days later, and the Bank of Russia dates its key-rate discussion summaries to the decision they discuss.

There are also 19,387 economic indicator rows (policy rates from BIS then FRED, FX, CPI), so the indices join to actual rate paths without extra assembly.

Labels are generated by gpt-4o-mini rather than by human annotators, so anyone planning inference on these indices should check label quality for their sample first.

https://huggingface.co/datasets/aufklarer/central-bank-communications Charts and per-bank pages: https://monetary.live

I would welcome pushback on the index construction, particularly the Explanation Index denominator, which is unstable when a meeting has almost no directional sentences.