2026-09-10T09:44:54Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:27565 2026-09-10T05:38:43Z ddc:004 open_access

Conceptual Vagueness in Human and LLM Representations: Evidence from Migration Distance Categorization (Short Paper) Wang, Songlin Janowicz, Krzysztof Benitez Cortes, Ailin Borderon, Marion Huang, Yingjing Karimi, Mina Liu, Zilong Süß, Annika Sakdapolrak, Patrick qualitative categories conceptual vagueness human migration large language models agreement Conceptual vagueness is a fundamental characteristic of many geographic categories. The varied definitions of "long-distance" and "short-distance" in migration studies provides a typical example. Although interpretations of these categories are inherently context-dependent and heterogeneous, they remain widely used in domain research. This study investigates the extent to which different individuals reach a consensus on conceptualizing these categories. With a migration related corpus where "long" and "short" are generally not explicitly mentioned, we elicit human and LLM judgments in classifying each article into these two categories. Both human-human and human-LLM agreements are quantified. Our results show that human agreements are only moderate, confirming substantial conceptual variability among informed readers. LLM outputs exhibit a comparable level of variability, failing to converge on a stable category boundary. This disagreement arises from multiple sources, from detection of implicit signals to their interpretations. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of using LLMs as probes to characterize conceptual vagueness in geography at scale. Returning to migration distance, we highlight that they should not be treated as universally shared categories in knowledge organization and representation. In contrast, resolving such vagueness requires richer contextual information or additional semantic signals. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Songlin Wang and Krzysztof Janowicz and Ailin Benitez Cortes and Marion Borderon and Yingjing Huang and Mina Karimi and Zilong Liu and Annika Süß and Patrick Sakdapolrak 2026 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 393, 17th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2026) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2026.21 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-275652 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2026.21 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode