CAIRNS: Balancing Readability and Scientific Accuracy in Climate Adaptation Question Answering

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Hauptverfasser: Kong, Liangji, Joshi, Aditya, Karimi, Sarvnaz
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Kong, Liangji
Joshi, Aditya
Karimi, Sarvnaz
author_facet Kong, Liangji
Joshi, Aditya
Karimi, Sarvnaz
contents Climate adaptation strategies are proposed in response to climate change. They are practised in agriculture to sustain food production. These strategies can be found in unstructured data (for example, scientific literature from the Elsevier website) or structured (heterogeneous climate data via government APIs). We present Climate Adaptation question-answering with Improved Readability and Noted Sources (CAIRNS), a framework that enables experts -- farmer advisors -- to obtain credible preliminary answers from complex evidence sources from the web. It enhances readability and citation reliability through a structured ScholarGuide prompt and achieves robust evaluation via a consistency-weighted hybrid evaluator that leverages inter-model agreement with experts. Together, these components enable readable, verifiable, and domain-grounded question-answering without fine-tuning or reinforcement learning. Using a previously reported dataset of expert-curated question-answers, we show that CAIRNS outperforms the baselines on most of the metrics. Our thorough ablation study confirms the results on all metrics. To validate our LLM-based evaluation, we also report an analysis of correlations against human judgment.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CAIRNS: Balancing Readability and Scientific Accuracy in Climate Adaptation Question Answering
Kong, Liangji
Joshi, Aditya
Karimi, Sarvnaz
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Climate adaptation strategies are proposed in response to climate change. They are practised in agriculture to sustain food production. These strategies can be found in unstructured data (for example, scientific literature from the Elsevier website) or structured (heterogeneous climate data via government APIs). We present Climate Adaptation question-answering with Improved Readability and Noted Sources (CAIRNS), a framework that enables experts -- farmer advisors -- to obtain credible preliminary answers from complex evidence sources from the web. It enhances readability and citation reliability through a structured ScholarGuide prompt and achieves robust evaluation via a consistency-weighted hybrid evaluator that leverages inter-model agreement with experts. Together, these components enable readable, verifiable, and domain-grounded question-answering without fine-tuning or reinforcement learning. Using a previously reported dataset of expert-curated question-answers, we show that CAIRNS outperforms the baselines on most of the metrics. Our thorough ablation study confirms the results on all metrics. To validate our LLM-based evaluation, we also report an analysis of correlations against human judgment.
title CAIRNS: Balancing Readability and Scientific Accuracy in Climate Adaptation Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02251