arXiv subjects

Ivan Decostanzi

Publications and source records attributed to Ivan Decostanzi.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Verifiable Disaster Storylines and Causal Knowledge Graphs: A Citation-Grounded Pipeline from Heterogeneous Humanitarian Sources

Effective humanitarian response depends on the rapid synthesis of heterogeneous, high-volume information sources - a task that routinely exceeds human analytical capacity in the critical early hours of a crisis. We present a pipeline that combines structured disaster records from EM-DAT with unstructured documents from ReliefWeb and the European Media Monitor (EMM) to produce source-grounded disaster storylines and causal knowledge graphs supporting situational awareness for responders and analysts. Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation, the pipeline extracts structured storylines - tabular event profiles covering 17 fields, from severity and key drivers to child-sensitive impact indicators - and constructs causal knowledge graphs where each node and edge is enriched with citation-grounded explanatory narratives, enabling full traceability back to primary sources. We evaluate the system on three diverse crisis use cases through a human evaluation involving 9 domain expert and 9 non-expert evaluators. Results confirm high retrieval precision, strong faithfulness of extracted causal relations, and a clear expert preference for citation-grounded components over ungrounded alternatives. The pipeline is designed to scale to the full EM-DAT catalogue, with the goal of publicly releasing a narrative-enriched version of the database.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

A Large-Language-Model Framework for Automated Humanitarian Situation Reporting

Timely and accurate situational reports are essential for humanitarian decision-making, yet current workflows remain largely manual, resource intensive, and inconsistent. We present a fully automated framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to transform heterogeneous humanitarian documents into structured and evidence-grounded reports. The system integrates semantic text clustering, automatic question generation, retrieval augmented answer extraction with citations, multi-level summarization, and executive summary generation, supported by internal evaluation metrics that emulate expert reasoning. We evaluated the framework across 13 humanitarian events, including natural disasters and conflicts, using more than 1,100 documents from verified sources such as ReliefWeb. The generated questions achieved 84.7 percent relevance, 84.0 percent importance, and 76.4 percent urgency. The extracted answers reached 86.3 percent relevance, with citation precision and recall both exceeding 76 percent. Agreement between human and LLM based evaluations surpassed an F1 score of 0.80. Comparative analysis shows that the proposed framework produces reports that are more structured, interpretable, and actionable than existing baselines. By combining LLM reasoning with transparent citation linking and multi-level evaluation, this study demonstrates that generative AI can autonomously produce accurate, verifiable, and operationally useful humanitarian situation reports.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

The relationship between episcopal genealogy and ideology in the Roman Catholic Church

In this study we investigate how hierarchical structures within the Roman Catholic Church shape the ideological orientation of its leadership. The full episcopal genealogy dataset comprises over 35,000 bishops, each typically consecrated by one principal consecrator and two co-consecrators, forming a dense and historically continuous directed network of episcopal lineage. Within this broader structure, we focus on a dataset of 245 living cardinals to examine whether genealogical proximity correlates with doctrinal alignment on a broad set of theological and sociopolitical issues. We identify motifs that capture recurring patterns of lineage, such as shared consecrators or co-consecrators. In parallel, we apply natural language processing techniques to extract each cardinal's publicly stated positions on ten salient topics, including LGBTQIA+ rights, women's roles in the Church, liturgy, bioethics, priestly celibacy, and migration. Our results show that cardinals linked by specific genealogical motifs, particularly those who share the same principal consecrator, are significantly more likely to exhibit ideological similarity. We find that the influence of pope John Paul II persists through the bishops he consecrated, who demonstrate systematically more conservative views than their peers. These findings underscore the role of hierarchical mentorship in shaping ideological coherence within large-scale religious institutions. Our contribution offers quantitative evidence that institutional lineages, beyond individual background factors, may have an impact on the transmission and consolidation of doctrinal positions over time.

physics.soc-ph↗