How reliable are retrieval-augmented and standard ChatGPT models to support flood susceptibility mapping?

Abstract This paper evaluates the performance of baseline and domain-augmented ChatGPT models for literature-based knowledge support in flood susceptibility mapping (FSM) using machine Learning approaches. To assess this, we designed five key questions related to FSM, with benchmark responses derived from our comprehensive review article (Pourzangbar et al., Journal of Flood Risk Management 18 , e70042), which analyzed 100 studies on ML applications in FSM. The same questions were posed (i) to standard ChatGPT-4 and ChatGPT-4o models without additional contextual material, and (ii) to a domain-augmented GPT-4 configuration (Chat-FSM) equipped with retrieval access to the 100 reviewed articles. The comparison highlights that GPT-based models can reasonably reproduce frequently reported machine learning models and conditioning factors from the reviewed literature, but show weaker consistency in feature selection methods, often suggesting less relevant techniques. Among the models, ChatGPT-4o demonstrated the weakest alignment with benchmark data, while Chat-FSM demonstrated the highest