Looking Complete Is Not Being Grounded: Evaluating LLM Sitreps Against Human-Authored Situation Reports
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Abstract (arXiv)
Evaluation for automatic crisis reporting should measure what practitioners need, not what is convenient to compare. Through LLM-assisted, author-approved content analysis, we derive a 15-slot information schema from professional humanitarian situation reports using qualitative content analysis, then evaluate 121 human and 261 LLM-generated reports across five disasters and three hazard types. Under google/gemini-3.7-flash on Cyclone Idai, the best machine arm is nominally above the empirical human ceiling (0.827 vs. 0.821), but the difference is statistically indistinguishable from zero (95% bootstrap CI [-.049,.059]; permutation p=.852), and the ordering does not replicate under openai/gpt-5.6-luna. On a blind 100-item Idai sample, the author agrees with the Gemini judge at 0.910 accuracy and unweighted Cohen's kappa=.799. All four judges clear the plan's raw-agreement criterion of .7; only Gemini reaches .7 on chance-corrected kappa. Across the three primary events, machine reports reproduce 5.4-11.0% of same-day official figures. Across those same events, raw exact-number matching links 14.3-19.6% of official figures and 85.4-90.1% of machine figures to the social stream; manual audit confirms 45/50 declared absences, 4/25 official matches, and 24/25 machine matches semantically. The issuing-provenance gap is positive in all 12 observed event-judge cells: report date, organisation, series, and authority were not supplied at professional-report coverage in any cell. On the three primary events, ROUGE-L is uninformative, BERTScore is negatively associated with completeness after multiplicity correction, and a generic LLM judge changes sign.
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References · 8
- 2023G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignmentcited by 2,276
- 2024LLM Evaluators Recognize and Favor Their Own Generationscited by 686
- 2016Twitter as a Lifeline: Human-annotated Twitter Corpora for NLP of Crisis-related Messagescited by 44
- 2021HumAID: Human-Annotated Disaster Incidents Data from Twitter with Deep Learning Benchmarkscited by 39
- 2022Re-Examining System-Level Correlations of Automatic Summarization Evaluation Metricscited by 38
- 2024Large Language Models in Qualitative Research: Uses, Tensions, and Intentionscited by 21
- 2022CrisisLTLSum: A Benchmark for Local Crisis Event Timeline Extraction and Summarizationcited by 7
- 2024On the Role of Summary Content Units in Text Summarization Evaluationcited by 5
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