Towards Automated Situation Awareness: A RAG-Based Framework for Peacebuilding Reports

Poli Nemkova, Suleyman Olcay Polat, Rafid Ishrak Jahan, Sagnik Ray Choudhury, Sun-Joo Lee, Shouryadipta Sarkar, Mark V. Albert


Abstract
Timely and accurate situation awareness underpins effective decision-making in humanitarian response, conflict monitoring, and peacebuilding. Yet, synthesizing heterogeneous and rapidly evolving information from news, conflict databases, and economic indicators remains labor-intensive and delays critical interventions. We present a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that autonomously produces structured, evidence-backed situation awareness reports by integrating real-time data from GDELT, ACLED, ReliefWeb, and World Bank APIs. To rigorously assess report quality without ground-truth references, we introduce a three-level reference-free evaluation framework combining automated NLP metrics, expert review by United Nations crisis analysts, and scalable LLM-as-a-Judge assessment. In a multi-country study across 15 conflict-prone regions, our system generated coherent, relevant, and actionable reports, with UNDP analysts estimating a ~50% reduction in report preparation time. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of deploying RAG-based systems for peacebuilding and humanitarian operations and provide a reproducible framework for generating and evaluating AI-assisted situational intelligence at scale.
Anthology ID:
2026.nlp4pi-1.39
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Katherine Atwell, Angana Borah, Daryna Dementieva, Elisa Kreiss, Neema Kotonya, Jiarui Liu, Liz Olson, Ruyuan Wan, Jieyu Zhao
Venues:
NLP4PI | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
511–529
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.39/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Poli Nemkova, Suleyman Olcay Polat, Rafid Ishrak Jahan, Sagnik Ray Choudhury, Sun-Joo Lee, Shouryadipta Sarkar, and Mark V. Albert. 2026. Towards Automated Situation Awareness: A RAG-Based Framework for Peacebuilding Reports. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI), pages 511–529, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Automated Situation Awareness: A RAG-Based Framework for Peacebuilding Reports (Nemkova et al., NLP4PI 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4pi-1.39.pdf