Benchmarking Frontier Large Language Models Against Official Crash Database Coding Using Police Crash Narratives

Abstract:Police crash narratives contain information that may supplement structured crash databases, but manual review is labor-intensive and it remains unclear how well large language models (LLMs) reproduce official crash coding. This study benchmarked six frontier LLMs by comparing narrative-derived crash attribute codes with corresponding fields in the Arkansas fatal-crash database. The analysis linked 5,587 fatal-crash narratives with 5,889 structured crash records from Arkansas (2015-2025), yielding 4,194 matched crashes. Six LLMs were evaluated using an identical zero-shot prompt to code crash manner, non-motorist relation, intersection type, work-zone relation, roadway surface condition, and light condition. Performance was evaluated using agreement, macro-averaged F1 score, Cohen's kappa, coverage, selective agreement, and comparisons with always-majority, always-Unknown, and keyword-rule baselines. Repeated-measures analyses and a generalized estimating equations model assessed differences among models and attributes. GPT-5.5 High achieved the highest agreement among the evaluated LLMs, but the always-majority baseline produced higher raw agreement and the keyword-rule baseline achieved macro-averaged F1 score and Cohen's kappa comparable to the best-performing LLM. Agreement was highest for non-motorist relation and crash manner and lowest for light condition, roadway surface condition, and work-zone relation. Differences across crash attributes exceeded differences across models. These results provide a benchmark for evaluating LLM-based crash coding and show that deployment should be evaluated on an attribute-specific basis using transparent baselines and human review.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2607.29064 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2607.29064v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.29064 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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