Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) Corpus

Transcripts of recurring meetings of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee (FOMC), where important aspects of U.S. monetary policy are decided, covering the period 1977-2008. (108,504 conversational exchanges between 364 speakers of FOMC board members in 268 meetings).

Distributed together with: Talk it up or play it down? (Un)expected correlations between (de-)emphasis and recurrence of discussion points in consequential U.S. economic policy meetings. Chenhao Tan and Lillian Lee. Presented in Text As Data 2016.

Please cite this paper when using FOMC corpus in your research.

Dataset details

Speaker-level information

Speakers in this dataset are FOMC members, indexed by their name as recorded in the transcripts.

  • id: name of the speaker

  • chair: (boolean) is speaker FOMC Chair

  • vice_chair: (boolean) is speaker FOMC Vice-Chair

Utterance-level information

For each utterance, we provide:

  • id: index of the utterance (concatenating the meeting date with the utterance’s sequence position)

  • speaker: the speaker who authored the utterance

  • conversation_id: ID of meeting

  • reply_to: id of the sequentially prior utterance (None for the first utterance of a meeting)

  • text: textual content of the utterance

  • timestamp: calculated value based off the date of the meeting and the speech index

Metadata for utterances include:

  • speech_index: index of utterance in the context of the conversation

  • parsed: parsed version of the utterance text, represented as a SpaCy Doc

Conversational-level information

Conversations are indexed by a string representing the meeting date.

Usage

To download directly with ConvoKit:

>>> from convokit import Corpus, download
>>> corpus = Corpus(filename=download("fomc-corpus"))

For some quick stats:

>>> corpus.print_summary_stats()
Number of Speakers: 364
Number of Utterances: 108504
Number of Conversations: 268

Additionally, if you want to process the original FOMC data into ConvoKit format you can use the following script Converting FOMC Corpus to ConvoKit Format

Additional note

The original dataset can be downloaded here. Refer to the original README for more explanations on dataset construction.

Contact

Please email any questions to: cristian@cs.cornell.edu (Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil).