Title

A Multimodal Approach to Generating Situation Awareness Reports for Humanitarian Decision-Making

Abstract

This paper presents a novel system for generating automated situation awareness reports tailored to humanitarian decision-makers. Using open-source data—including news articles (GDELT API), conflict data (ACLED API), economic indicators (World Bank API), and humanitarian insights (ReliefWeb API)—our system integrates a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework to provide cohesive crisis overviews, recent trends, and key events. We evaluate the system’s effectiveness in generating actionable insights, addressing challenges in multimodal data fusion, and ensuring interpretability and reliability in crisis contexts through human evaluation by end users.

1. Introduction

• Motivation:
  • Humanitarian crises demand timely and accurate situation awareness to support decision-making.
  • NGOs and UN agencies rely on fragmented data sources, leading to inefficiencies and potential blind spots.
• Objective:
  • Develop a system that synthesizes multimodal data into cohesive, actionable situation awareness reports.
  • Provide a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of such systems in real-world scenarios.

2. Related Work

• Situation Awareness in Crisis Response: Overview of existing tools and methodologies.
• Multimodal Data Fusion: Techniques and challenges.
• Generative AI in Decision Support: Applications of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks.
• Ethical Concerns: Addressing bias and misinformation in AI-generated outputs.

3. Research Questions

1. Support for Human Analysts: How effectively can automated situation awareness reports support or complement the work of human analysts in humanitarian decision-making?
2. Open-Source vs. Proprietary Solutions: What are the trade-offs between open-source and proprietary LLM solutions in generating actionable crisis awareness reports, considering factors like cost, performance, adaptability, and transparency?
3. Prompt Optimization: Which prompt engineering strategies optimize the quality of automated situation awareness reports for crisis contexts?
4. System Flexibility: What design principles enable the development of a flexible system adaptable to similar tasks in crisis analysis and reporting?

4. Methodology

4.1 Data Sources