MAXIMILIAN AHRENS

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in NLP | Co-Investigator for the Alan Turing Institute Research Grant on Narrative Detection

NLP for economic and financial modelling |  NLP for narrative and misinformation detection | NLP & causal inference 

Oxford University | Department of Engineering Science | Department of Economics | OxNLP Group | Oxford-Man Institute

About me

I'm a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.  My main research interests lie in machine learning methods for natural language processing (NLP) and applications for narrative and misinformation detection, financial market modelling and economic forecasting, and  causal inference. 

I'm also the Co-Principal Investigator for the Alan Turing Institute Research Grant on Narrative Detection.

My PhD thesis is on multimodal language models for economics and finance. I'm a research member and co-organiser of the OxNLP Group at Oxford that focusses on NLP for social data science applications. I'm also a research member of the Machine Learning Research Group and the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance.  


I'm the founder and lead organiser of the Conference on NLP for Social Data Sciences (SoDaS) (previously named NLP for Economic and Financial Modelling).

Prior to my PhD work, I obtained an MPhil in Economics from Oxford University and an M.Sc. in Specialised Economic Analysis from the Barcelona School of Economics. I previously worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, as a trainee economist with the European Central Bank, and as machine learning summer researcher/quant with Man AHL.

Recent News

July 2023: I'm presenting our paper on multimodal NLP frameworks for central bank communication analysis at the the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Central Bank Research Association at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Columbia University (New York City, USA)

June 2023: We are hosting the second edition of our annual research conference on NLP for Social Data Science (NLP SoDaS)  in Oxford - 28-29 June. I'm the lead-organizer of the event.

June 2023: We just published our new working paper on multimodal NLP frameworks for central bank communication analysis: "Mind Your Language: Market Reactions to Central Bank Speeches"

May  2023: We are  presenting our paper on multimodal NLP frameworks for central bank communication analysis at the ECONDAT 2023 Conference for Economics with non-traditional data and analytical tools jointly organised by the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, and the Data Analytics for Finance and Macro Research Centre at King's College London  (London, UK)

April 2023: I'm presenting my working paper on NLP benchmarks for economics and finance at the Centre for Economic Research Policy (CEPR) Webinar Series

April 2023:  Our working paper on multimodal NLP frameworks for central bank communication analysis got accepted to be presented at the Qatar Centre for Global Banking and Finance Annual Conference 2023

Feb 2023: I'm presenting a working paper on an NLP benchmark suite for economics and finance at the Economics Seminar at the University of Oxford (Oxford, UK)

Jan 2023: I'm honoured to have won an Alan Turing Institute research grant to work on "narrative analysis with multimodal language and graph models"

Selected Research

Ahrens:
Identifying monetary policy shocks with natural language processing
MPhil thesis 2018

Teaching