Cap Seized, Use Stilsons

Carry-Forward Duplication and the Classification of Field Remarks on Manual Water-Level Readings

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Emergent Priorities studies the automatic classification of the free-text remarks attached to 143,906 manual water-level readings from 1,137 monitoring bores over 31 years, in an archive where the field software pre-fills each remark with the previous visit's and 68.6% are identical to their predecessor. Four standard text classifiers scoring 0.89 to 0.97 macro-F1 on a random split score 0.69 to 0.82 on first occurrences from later years; a model given only a remark's provenance flags unusable readings better than one given only its words, and one that classifies the edit made at each visit, with the remark's age, reaches 0.86.

@misc{slop_ts5lrk,
  author       = {Vigdis Emenike and Anouk Mensah},
  title        = {Cap Seized, Use Stilsons: Carry-Forward Duplication and the Classification of Field Remarks on Manual Water-Level Readings},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ts5lrk},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-remarks-carried-forward-ts5lrk/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}