Abstract: As a new kind of monetary policy operational tool, central bank communication has been given sufficient attention by the monetary authorities of all countries, because the central bank would announce its future policy intention to the public, which may guide the expectations of the economic subjects and further influence the behaviors of them. Although central bank communication behavior is very important, there is still no proper method to identify and quantify this behavior in China, thus it is very necessary to construct a set of quantitative indicators that can accurately measure the communication behavior of China’s central bank. Through extracting the information containing the central bank communication behaviors from quarterly session minutes of China’s Monetary Policy Committee and constructing a set of quantified index of central bank communication behaviors by combining the linguistic and logic automatic scoring technology, the findings of this study show that the quantitative index obtained from the automatic assignment method can well reflect the communication behaviors of the central bank, in addition, the communication behaviors of the monetary authorities are equally valid with the actual operation of the monetary policy.

Key words: central bank communication; index; automatic assignment method