# Ornithologist: Towards Trustworthy "Reasoning" about Central Bank Communications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09083 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09083/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 9 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Can ChatGPT Understand Too? A Comparative Study on ChatGPT and Fine-tuned BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10198/) (2023)
- [Automated Phrase Mining from Massive Text Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04457/) (2017)
- [GPT Deciphering Fedspeak: Quantifying Dissent Among Hawks and Doves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19110/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

I develop Ornithologist, a weakly-supervised textual classification system and measure the hawkishness and dovishness of central bank text. Ornithologist uses ``taxonomy-guided reasoning'', guiding a large language model with human-authored decision trees. This increases the transparency and explainability of the system and makes it accessible to non-experts. It also reduces hallucination risk. Since it requires less supervision than traditional classification systems, it can more easily be applied to other problems or sources of text (e.g. news) without much modification. Ornithologist measurements of hawkishness and dovishness of RBA communication carry information about the future of the cash rate path and of market expectations.