Assessing socio-economic climate impacts from text data

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) have enabled the systematic use of large-scale textual data from news, social media, and reports to create datasets with socio-economic impacts of climate hazards such as floods, droughts, storms, and multi-hazard events. As the field of text-as-data for impact assessment expands, so does its methodological complexity. Yet research remains fragmented, with no clear guidelines for defining what constitutes an impact, handling temporal and spatial biases, and selecting appropriate modeling and post-processing strategies. This lack of coherence limits transparency and comparability across studies. Here, we address this gap by synthesising common practices, describing key challenges specific to the use of text-as-data methods for analyzing socio-economic impact data, and proposing recommendations to address them. By providing guidance on best practices, we aim to support the construction of robust text-derived socio-economic impact datasets that can more accurately inform disaster risk management and attribution studies.

Climate-Eval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for NLP Tasks Related to Climate Change

Climate-Eval is a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate natural language processing models across a broad range of tasks related to climate change. Climate-Eval aggregates existing datasets along with a newly developed news classification dataset, created specifically for this release. This results in a benchmark of 25 tasks based on 13 datasets, covering key aspects of climate discourse, including text classification, question answering, and information extraction. Our benchmark provides a standardized evaluation suite for systematically assessing the performance of large language models (LLMs) on these tasks. Additionally, we conduct an extensive evaluation of open-source LLMs (ranging from 2B to 70B parameters) in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, analyzing their strengths and limitations in the domain of climate change.

Can LLMs Detect Intrinsic Hallucinations in Paraphrasing and Machine Translation?

A frequently observed problem with LLMs is their tendency to generate output that is nonsensical, illogical, or factually incorrect, often referred to broadly as hallucination. Building on the recently proposed HalluciGen task for hallucination detection and generation, we evaluate a suite of open-access LLMs on their ability to detect intrinsic hallucinations in two conditional generation tasks: translation and paraphrasing. We study how model performance varies across tasks and language and we investigate the impact of model size, instruction tuning, and prompt choice. We find that performance varies across models but is consistent across prompts. Finally, we find that NLI models perform comparably well, suggesting that LLM-based detectors are not the only viable option for this specific task.