Who Warmed the Archives? LLMs Overestimate Historical Warmth
Historical archives are an under-used source for extending the instrumental climate record backward in time, and LLMs offer a way to extract the indices climatologists derive by hand. Beyond measuring how well systems extract this signal, we check whether their errors are safe to use for cross-century comparison, since a good correlation score does not rule out systematic, era-linked bias. Comparing lexical baselines, fine-tuned historical transformers, and LLM prompting on the Pfister temperature index across five centuries of German text, lexical methods beat every fine-tuned transformer we test, including one pretrained from scratch on historical German (r=-0.016). All six LLMs we test...
| Authors | Claudiu Creanga, Liviu P. Dinu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 September 2026 |
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