Road traffic accidents remain a major public safety and socio-economic issue in developing countries like Bangladesh. Existing accident data collection is largely manual, fragmented, and unreliable, resulting in underreporting and inconsistent records. This research proposes a fully automated system using Large Language Models (LLMs) and web scraping techniques to address these challenges. The pipeline consists of four components: automated web scraping code generation, news collection from online sources, accident news classification with structured data extraction, and duplicate removal. The system uses the multimodal generative LLM Gemini-2.0-Flash for seamless automation. The code generation module classifies webpages into pagination, dynamic, or infinite scrolling categories and generates suitable Python scripts for scraping. LLMs also classify and extract key accident information such as date, time, location, fatalities, injuries, road type, vehicle types, and pedestrian involvement. A deduplication algorithm ensures data integrity by removing duplicate reports. The system scraped 14 major Bangladeshi news sites over 111 days (Oct 1, 2024 - Jan 20, 2025), processing over 15,000 news articles and identifying 705 unique accidents. The code generation module achieved 91.3% calibration and 80% validation accuracy. Chittagong reported the highest number of accidents (80), fatalities (70), and injuries (115), followed by Dhaka, Faridpur, Gazipur, and Cox's Bazar. Peak accident times were morning (8-9 AM), noon (12-1 PM), and evening (6-7 PM). A public repository was also developed with usage instructions. This study demonstrates the viability of an LLM-powered, scalable system for accurate, low-effort accident data collection, providing a foundation for data-driven road safety policymaking in Bangladesh.

This research showcases the innovative integration of Large Language Models into machine learning workflows for traffic incident management, focusing on the classification of incident severity using accident reports. By leveraging features generated by modern language models alongside conventional data extracted from incident reports, our research demonstrates improvements in the accuracy of severity classification across several machine learning algorithms. Our contributions are threefold. First, we present an extensive comparison of various machine learning models paired with multiple large language models for feature extraction, aiming to identify the optimal combinations for accurate incident severity classification. Second, we contrast traditional feature engineering pipelines with those enhanced by language models, showcasing the superiority of language-based feature engineering in processing unstructured text. Third, our study illustrates how merging baseline features from accident reports with language-based features can improve the severity classification accuracy. This comprehensive approach not only advances the field of incident management but also highlights the cross-domain application potential of our methodology, particularly in contexts requiring the prediction of event outcomes from unstructured textual data or features translated into textual representation. Specifically, our novel methodology was applied to three distinct datasets originating from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Queensland, Australia. This cross-continental application underlines the robustness of our approach, suggesting its potential for widespread adoption in improving incident management processes globally.

Mapping of spatial hotspots, i.e., regions with significantly higher rates or probability density of generating certain events (e.g., disease or crime cases), is a important task in diverse societal domains, including public health, public safety, transportation, agriculture, environmental science, etc. Clustering techniques required by these domains differ from traditional clustering methods due to the high economic and social costs of spurious results (e.g., false alarms of crime clusters). As a result, statistical rigor is needed explicitly to control the rate of spurious detections. To address this challenge, techniques for statistically-robust clustering have been extensively studied by the data mining and statistics communities. In this survey we present an up-to-date and detailed review of the models and algorithms developed by this field. We first present a general taxonomy of the clustering process with statistical rigor, covering key steps of data and statistical modeling, region enumeration and maximization, significance testing, and data update. We further discuss different paradigms and methods within each of key steps. Finally, we highlight research gaps and potential future directions, which may serve as a stepping stone in generating new ideas and thoughts in this growing field and beyond.

Automatic understanding of domain specific texts in order to extract useful relationships for later use is a non-trivial task. One such relationship would be between railroad accidents' causes and their correspondent descriptions in reports. From 2001 to 2016 rail accidents in the U.S. cost more than $4.6B. Railroads involved in accidents are required to submit an accident report to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). These reports contain a variety of fixed field entries including primary cause of the accidents (a coded variable with 389 values) as well as a narrative field which is a short text description of the accident. Although these narratives provide more information than a fixed field entry, the terminologies used in these reports are not easy to understand by a non-expert reader. Therefore, providing an assisting method to fill in the primary cause from such domain specific texts(narratives) would help to label the accidents with more accuracy. Another important question for transportation safety is whether the reported accident cause is consistent with narrative description. To address these questions, we applied deep learning methods together with powerful word embeddings such as Word2Vec and GloVe to classify accident cause values for the primary cause field using the text in the narratives. The results show that such approaches can both accurately classify accident causes based on report narratives and find important inconsistencies in accident reporting.