Contemporary Debates: Asst. Prof. Yasin Kütük
The guest of the Contemporary Debates series organized by Kadir Has University Department of Economics will be Asst. Prof. Yasin Kütük (Altınbaş University).
Dr. Kütük will discuss “Semantic Analysis of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey Communication Reports, Forecasting, and Market Interactions” at B-201 on Thursday, December 14th at 17:00.
The event is in English.
Abstract: In this research, a statistical system is designed to understand, interpret, and quantify the reports issued by the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (CBRT), an institution that drives expectations and shapes the market to all agents are related to them. The corpora constituted with these reports are CBRT’s summaries of monetary policy committee meetings (SMPCM hereafter) published as official press releases. Except for the period after 2017, SMPCMs are published by the CBRT monthly in both Turkish and English; the latter is the language preferred to be utilized in this article. SMPCMs have three parts: inflation developments (IFD), factors affecting inflation (FAI), monetary policy, and risks (MPR). The graphical representation of items counted and words used as descriptives shows the CBRT rippled together with business cycles; the CBRT uses more words, uses more items during the periods of business cycles. Later, the corpora under these three categories are evaluated according to their semantic scores. By using WordNet, the lemmas in each sentence in corpora are tagged semantically to estimate the tone of the CBRT and the whole meanings of reports. Owing to SNLP tools, sentences are scored in between -1, meaning entirely negative, and +1, meaning completely positive; later, chapter-based generalized semantic score vectors (SSV) are estimated. As results proved, semantics in chapters FAI and MPR are more sensible and accurately reflect the economic situation, in overall, it has been revealed that the CBRT communicates with the market in a tone parallel to the business cycles. In the period of recession, the CBRT preferred communication in a relatively more pessimistic tone. After obtaining semantic scores as a time series within these three categories, a Long-Short Term Memory Network is established to derive a quantitative model in order to forecast the semantic score of each SMPCM which will be issued in the near future. The LSTM model provides 93% accuracy to estimate semantic scores of SMPCMs. In addition, the short-term and long-term market effects of these reports are also examined, and standard ARDL models are constructed for this purpose. Semantic indicators are found to be influential for 6-month interest rates and CDS rates of Turkey.
About the Speaker: Yasin Kutuk is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Altinbas University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Istanbul Technical University with a dissertation entitled “Essays on Estimation Methods: Three Comparative Essays on Econometrics and Machine Learning.” He holds a BA in Philosophy and Business Administration, and an MA in Economics with an award-winning thesis. He mainly specializes in computational social science (CSS), covering deep learning, natural language processing, applied/theoretical econometrics, and statistics. He has taught these for four years at Altinbas University in the Department of Economics and also publishes in CSS. He also worked as a researcher at Sabancı University and Cass Business School. He has published several articles in Finance Research Letters, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Empirical Economics, Borsa Istanbul Review, and Social Science Quarterly. He has completed one international (EU) and five national projects (TUBITAK). He holds four prizes, including Graduate Thesis by the Turkish Economics Association, the Ibn KHALDUN Prize by the Middle East Economics Association, the Asaf Savaş AKAT Economics Prize by Iktisat ve Toplum Dergisi (the Journal of Economics and Society), and the Academics Prize by Turkish Researchers’ Association. In 2022 and 2023, he was awarded the performance award of Outstanding Academic Excellence at Altınbaş University, where he is working. He is an active member of several organizations in economics and econometrics, including the Middle East Economics Association, the Econometric Society and the International Association for Applied Econometrics, the Economic Philosophy – GREQAM, and the World Economics Association. He is also actively working on the Editorial Board of Springer Nature’s “Business and Economics”. He also worked as a reviewer on “Computational Economics”, “Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications”, “Journal of the Knowledge Economy”, “Nature”, and “Kybernetes”. Details are on https://yasinkutuk.github.io/.