Narrative is a concept studied across a wide variety of research disciplines, ranging from classic linguistics to social sciences, engineering, and computer science. The NarrativeLab project aims to build the foundational understanding on (1) how to define narrative, (2) how to extract such narrative from text automatically and at scale, and (3) through the use of such narrative information, how to enhance modern machine learning methods for downstream tasks such as the detection of conspiracy theory, rumour, and other forms of disinformation. This presentation will present the progress on these fronts with examples from the papers currently under review and in progress.

About the speaker

Michael McMahon is Professor of Economics at University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at St Hugh’s College. He previously worked at Warwick University and has also given courses at INSEAD, NYU, Chicago Booth, LBS and LSE. He has delivered capacity building courses throughout Asia with the IMF’s Singapore Training Institute. He worked at the Bank of England for many years. Since April 2019, he has served as a Council member of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and he is currently the Acting Chair of the Council. Michael is a research fellow of the CEPR and Director of the Research Policy Network on Central Bank Communication. He is also Deputy Director of Nuffield Centre for Applied Macro Policy (NuCaMP), and is affiliated with LSE’s Centre for Macroeconomics where he previously co-edited the CfM Survey.

His interests lie in macroeconomics of monetary economics, fiscal policy, business cycles, inventories and applied econometrics. A key feature of his recent research is the use of interdisciplinary, data science techniques to understand communication and deliberation in central banks. His research has been published in journals