Design and Application of Multimodal Large Language Model Based System for End to End Automation of Accident Dataset Generation
This provides a scalable solution for accurate accident data collection to support road safety policymaking in developing countries like Bangladesh, though it is incremental as it applies existing LLM techniques to a new domain.
The researchers tackled the problem of unreliable manual accident data collection in Bangladesh by developing an automated system using multimodal LLMs and web scraping, which processed over 15,000 news articles to identify 705 unique accidents with 91.3% calibration accuracy in code generation.
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.