Communication scores support symmetric inflation preferences
Giulia Iadisernia and Giulio Carlo Venturi find evidence supporting symmetric inflation preferences at the European Central Bank (ECB). Their language model scores 270 press conferences from January 2000 to September 2026.
From sentences to policy tone
In Bank of Italy Occasional Paper No. 1075, the authors use RoBERTa models to filter economic sentences, identify monetary policy relevance and classify tone into five ordered categories.
They aggregate scores using relevance weights and add inflation-forecast context to resolve ambiguous language.
Training draws on approximately 13,500 manually labeled sentences from 104 press conferences.
The relevance model achieves test balanced accuracy of 0.8725; the tone model records balanced quadratic weighted kappa of 0.7234. The index co-moves with ECB inflation projections, policy rates and the shadow rate.
Scores range from −1.05 on April 30, 2020, to 0.67 on December 15, 2022.
Two tests of economic meaning
Using tone to control for the economic outlook, the authors estimate that a 25 basis point policy-rate increase reduces HICP inflation by 0.27 percentage points over twelve months.
They also infer inflation preferences from absolute tone scores grouped in 0.2 percentage point inflation buckets.
The loss function becomes virtually symmetric when sentences concern only inflation and observations above 4 percent after July 2021 are excluded.
This contrasts with Haavio et al. (2026), who find greater aversion to above-target inflation.
Symmetry depends on selection
The symmetry result depends on sentence filtering and excluding high-inflation observations.
Broader sentence selection produces greater aversion to below-target inflation.
The authors attribute differences from earlier research to topic selection, full-transcript coverage and model design.