Assessing the Effectiveness of GPT-4o in Climate Change Evidence Synthesis and Systematic Assessments: Preliminary Insights

Elphin Joe, Sai Koneru, Christine Kirchhoff


Abstract
In this research short, we examine the potential of using GPT-4o, a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) to undertake evidence synthesis and systematic assessment tasks. Traditional workflows for such tasks involve large groups of domain experts who manually review and synthesize vast amounts of literature. The exponential growth of scientific literature and recent advances in LLMs provide an opportunity to complementing these traditional workflows with new age tools. We assess the efficacy of GPT-4o to do these tasks on a sample from the dataset created by the Global Adaptation Mapping Initiative (GAMI) where we check the accuracy of climate change adaptation related feature extraction from the scientific literature across three levels of expertise. Our results indicate that while GPT-4o can achieve high accuracy in low-expertise tasks like geographic location identification, their performance in intermediate and high-expertise tasks, such as stakeholder identification and assessment of depth of the adaptation response, is less reliable. The findings motivate the need for designing assessment workflows that utilize the strengths of models like GPT-4o while also providing refinements to improve their performance on these tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.climatenlp-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Dominik Stammbach, Jingwei Ni, Tobias Schimanski, Kalyan Dutia, Alok Singh, Julia Bingler, Christophe Christiaen, Neetu Kushwaha, Veruska Muccione, Saeid A. Vaghefi, Markus Leippold
Venues:
ClimateNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
251–257
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.climatenlp-1.20
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.climatenlp-1.20
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elphin Joe, Sai Koneru, and Christine Kirchhoff. 2024. Assessing the Effectiveness of GPT-4o in Climate Change Evidence Synthesis and Systematic Assessments: Preliminary Insights. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024), pages 251–257, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Assessing the Effectiveness of GPT-4o in Climate Change Evidence Synthesis and Systematic Assessments: Preliminary Insights (Joe et al., ClimateNLP-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.climatenlp-1.20.pdf