An LLM-Based Inventory Construction Framework of Urban Ground Collapse Events with Spatiotemporal Locations

Abstract

Historical news media reports serve as a vital data source for understanding the risk of urban ground collapse (UGC) events. At present, the application of large language models (LLMs) offers unprecedented opportunities to effectively extract UGC events and their spatiotemporal information from a vast amount of news reports and media data. Therefore, this study proposes an LLM-based inventory construction framework consisting of three steps: news reports crawling, UGC event recognition, and event attribute extraction. Focusing on Zhejiang province, China, as the test region, a total of 27 cases of collapse events from 637 news reports were collected for 11 prefecture-level cities. The method achieved a recall rate of over 60% and a precision below 35%, indicating its potential for effectively and automatically screening collapse events; however, the accuracy needs to be improved to account for confusion with other urban collapse events, such as bridge collapses. The obtained UGC event inventory is the first open access inventory based on internet news reports, event dates and locations, and collapse co-ordinates derived from unstructured contents. Furthermore, this study provides insights into the spatial pattern of UGC frequency in Zhejiang province, effectively supplementing the statistical data provided by the local government.