AutoEconSentiment

auto-econ-sentiment is a reproducible pipeline for measuring economic sentiment in central bank and financial text.

What It Does

• Load: CSV, Excel, Parquet or a directory of .txt and Markdown files, with dates parsed from filenames
• Clean: normalize economic text, tokenize, stem, split into sentences or paragraphs
• Score: six central bank and financial dictionaries, plus optional transformer and LLM scoring with explicit label mappings
• Compare: every _net column lies in $[-1, 1]$ with zero as neutral, so methods share one scale
• Export: cleaned text, matched words, counts, probabilities and sentiment scores
• Audit: dictionary and model disagreement stays visible for research workflows

Table of Contents

• What It Does
• Documentation
• Quick Start
• Transformer Quick Start
• LLM Quick Start
• CBS Speeches Demo
• Citations

Documentation

• Architecture
  • pipeline stages and components
  • config-driven design, tests, directory tree
• Data and Outputs
  • input formats, directory loader
  • output files, column names, score scales
• Examples
  • YAML and Python runs
  • segmentation, method comparison, transformer setup
• LLM Scoring
  • Ollama and OpenAI-compatible providers
  • polarity x confidence, prompts, output columns
• Roadmap
  • v1.0.2 scope, planned features
  • release and tagging steps
• Transformer notebook
  • walkthrough of transformer scoring

Quick Start

Install from PyPI, adding the extras you need:

pip install auto-econ-sentiment                 # lexical dictionaries only
pip install 'auto-econ-sentiment[transformers]' # + Hugging Face classifiers
pip install 'auto-econ-sentiment[llm]'          # + Ollama / OpenAI-compatible LLMs

Or, working from a clone of this repository:

uv sync

Run the default YAML-configured pipeline:

uv run python -m src.auto_econ_sentiment.pipeline

Or call the Python API:

from auto_econ_sentiment.pipeline import AutoEconSentiment

analyzer = AutoEconSentiment(
    import_file_path="data/raw/basic_tests/monetary_policy_statement.parquet.gzip",
    text_column="text",
    date_column="date",
    export_path="data/sentiment/basic_tests/",
)

analyzer.run(
    clean_config={"tokenize": True, "stem": True},
    dictionaries={"unstemmed": ["correa", "hubert", "lm", "hiv"], "stemmed": ["ap", "bn"]},
    aggregation_methods=["posneg", "allwords"],
    export_results=True,
)

Transformer Quick Start

Transformer support is optional so lexical users do not need to install torch or download Hugging Face models.

uv sync --extra transformers

Then enable transformer models in params.yaml:

transformer:
  enabled: true
  text_column_transformer: text_clean
  aggregation_methods: [bysentence]
  output_schema: shares
  min_sentence_chars: 20
  sentence_probability_cutoff: 0.7
  models:
    - name: gtfintechlab/FOMC-RoBERTa
      short_name: fomc
      num_labels: 3
      # FOMC-RoBERTa classifies stance: LABEL_0 dovish, LABEL_1 hawkish,
      # LABEL_2 neutral. Hawkish maps to +1.
      label_mapping:
        LABEL_0: negative
        LABEL_1: positive
        LABEL_2: neutral
      sentiment_values:
        positive: 1
        negative: -1
        neutral: 0

The transformer examples in params.yaml show the supported model-list format, including each model's label mapping.

Transformer runs export sentiment_transformer.parquet.gzip and, for sentence-level aggregation, sentiment_transformer_sentence_probabilities.parquet.gzip, which carries each sentence's number and text next to its class probabilities.

LLM Quick Start

uv sync --extra llm

Set llm.enabled: true in params.yaml and point it at a local Ollama model or any OpenAI-compatible API. See LLM Scoring for providers, prompting and output columns.

CBS Speeches Demo

Download the CBS central bank speeches dataset and run the sentiment pipeline:

uv run python -m src.data.cb_speeches_download
uv run python -m src.data.cb_speeches_clean

Then open notebooks/demo_cb_speechs.ipynb to explore the outputs.

Citations

To cite auto-econ-sentiment itself, use the Cite this repository button on GitHub, which reads CITATION.cff. Contributions are welcome; see CONTRIBUTING.

Dataset:

• Campiglio, E., Deyris, J., Romelli, D., & Scalisi, G. (2025). Warning words in a warming world: Central bank communication and climate change. European Economic Review, 105101.

Lexical dictionaries:

• Loughran, T. and B. McDonald (2011). When Is a Liability Not a Liability? Textual Analysis, Dictionaries, and 10-Ks. The Journal of Finance 66, 35-65.
• Correa, R., K. Garud, J. Londono, and N. Mislang (2017). Sentiment in Central Bank as Financial Stability Reports. International Finance Discussion Paper 1203.
• Hubert, P. and F. Labondance (2021). The signaling effects of central bank tone. European Economic Review 133, 103684.
• Stone, P. J., D. C. Dunphy, and M. S. Smith (1966). The General Inquirer: A Computer Approach to Content Analysis.
• Apel, M. and M. Blix Grimaldi (2014). How Informative Are Central Bank Minutes? Review of Economics 65(1), 53-76.
• Bennani, H. and M. Neuenkirch (2017). The (Home) Bias of European Central Bankers. Applied Economics 49(11), 1114-1131.

Transformer models:

• Pfeifer, M. and V. P. Marohl (2023). CentralBankRoBERTa: A fine-tuned large language model for central bank communications. The Journal of Finance and Data Science 9, 100114.
• Shah, A., S. Paturi, and S. Chava (2023). Trillion Dollar Words: A New Financial Dataset, Task & Market Analysis. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 6664-6679.
• Araci, D. (2019). FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Models. arXiv:1908.10063.
• Huang, A. H., H. Wang, and Y. Yang (2023). FinBERT: A Large Language Model for Extracting Information from Financial Text. Contemporary Accounting Research 40(2), 806-841.