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29 April, 2021 – Speech by Orsolya Ring at conference organised by MILAB and the Digital Wellbeing Program Orsolya Ring gave a talk entitled ‘Measuring Customer Satisfaction through the Evaluation of Texts’ at the online conference jointly organised by MILAB and the Digital Wellbeing Program (Digitális Jólét Program). The online conference examined the effects the recent boom in language technology has had on customer services. More information about the conference is available on the event’s website (in Hungarian).

14 April, 2021 – New publication: Article by Miklós Sebők, Kristin Makszin and Jasper Simons in East European Politics Miklós Sebők, Kristin Makszin and Jasper Simons’ new article entitled ’Mission adapted: the hidden role of governors in shaping central bank operating missions in Hungary’ has been published in the East European Politics journal. ABSTRACT: ’Despite the diffusion of the paradigm of central bank independence, there is still meaningful variation in the operating missions of central banks both across countries and over time. Through a detailed qualitative case study, this article develops the concept of the operating mission of the central bank and applies it to the case of the Hungarian National Bank (MNB) to provide a more complete understanding of mission shift. Our findings demonstrate the critical role of policy agency, as the central bank governors moulded the operating mission of the central bank, even in the face of dominant international norms.’ The full article is available here. (OpenAccess)

14 April, 2021 – The CLARIN project ends with fruitful results poltextLAB’s CLARIN project came to a successful end. The annotated corpus consisting of 3086 parliamentary speeches can be accessed through the following link and on poltextLAB’s GitHub page.

3 February, 2021 – New publication: Article by Ákos Máté, Miklós Sebők and Tamás Barczikay in PLOS ONE Ákos Máté, Miklós Sebők and Tamás Barczikay recently published an article entitled ‘The effect of central bank communication on sovereign bond yields: The case of Hungary’  The open-access article is available here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0245515 ‘In this article, we investigate how the public communication of the Hungarian Central Bank’s Monetary Council (MC) affects Hungarian sovereign bond yields. This research ties into the advances made in the financial and political economy literature which rely on extensive textual data and quantitative text analysis tools. While prior research demonstrated that forward guidance, in the form of council meeting minutes or press releases can be used as predictors of rate decisions, we are interested in whether they are able to directly influence asset returns as well. In order to capture the effect of central bank communication, we measure the latent hawkish or dovish sentiment of MC press releases from 2005 to 2019 by applying a sentiment dictionary, a staple in the text mining toolkit. Our results show that central bank forward guidance has an intra-year effect on bond yields. However, the hawkish or dovish sentiment of press releases has no impact on maturities of one year or longer where the policy rate proves to be the most important explanatory variable. Our research also contributes to the literature by applying a specialized dictionary to monetary policy as well as broadening the discussion by analyzing a case from the non-eurozone Central-Eastern region of the European Union.’