Description of the Minutes and Monetary Policy Reports using Computational Linguistics tools
La serie Borradores de Economía es una publicación de la Subgerencia de Estudios Económicos del Banco de la República. Los trabajos son de carácter provisional, las opiniones y posibles errores son responsabilidad exclusiva del autor y sus contenidos no comprometen al Banco de la República ni a su Junta Directiva.
The series Borradores de Economía (Working Papers on Economics) contributes to the dissemination and promotion of the work by researchers from the institution. On multiple occasions, these works have been the result of collaborative work with individuals from other national or international institutions. This series is indexed at Research Papers in Economics (RePEc)
The opinions contained in this document are the sole responsibility of the author and do not commit Banco de la República or its Board of Directors.
Abstract
Based on the use of Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a computational linguistics tool whose purpose is to identify the underlying thematic patterns that group the words of a set of documents, we analyse two essential outlets in the Banco de la Republica’s communication, the minutes and monetary policy reports, from March 2007 to December 2018. We find that these two outlets discuss primarily about eight topics, the most important (on average, over time) being the one that contains expressions mainly related to domestic demand and economic sectors. We describe both similarities and differences that are observed, between the minutes and the reports, in the participation of each topic within the documents and in the evolution of that participation over time.
