CrashSketch
Research preview Automated-vehicle crash reporting

Every police crash report carries a sketch. Automated-vehicle reports carry only prose.

CrashSketch turns a written crash report into an engineering collision diagram. A language model extracts a typed scene schema in which every field points back at the words that justify it; a deterministic solver places the scene; a deterministic renderer draws it. The diagram is of the report, never of the crash, and it says so on its face.

Interactive examples 100 curated cases Method under review Code and data not yet released

Nothing in the diagram that is not in the report

Highlighted phrases are the spans the extractor quoted to justify a field. Hover one to see which part of the scene it grounds. What is not highlighted is what the diagram had to assume, and that share is measured for every case.

Hover a highlighted phrase.
Generated collision diagram
How a paragraph becomes a drawing
01

Read the report

A language model fills a typed scene schema: who was there, what each was doing, who made contact and where. Every value quotes the phrase that supports it, or is marked as an inference.

Language model
02

Check the schema

The schema is validated against its specification, and quotes are located back in the source text. A quote that cannot be found was not copied out of the report.

Deterministic
03

Place the scene

A geometry solver turns topology into coordinates. The model never emits a coordinate. Unstated values take documented defaults and are drawn as uncertain rather than as fact.

Deterministic
04

Draw it

A renderer maps the placed scene to vector line art in the register traffic engineers already read. The same schema always produces the same drawing, byte for byte.

Deterministic

A diagram is an assertion. This one names its source.

These reports are written by the vehicle manufacturer and are uncorroborated. A drawing made from one inherits that perspective completely, and a clean diagram is far more persuasive than the paragraph behind it. So every output carries a permanent mark stating whose account it depicts.

The same discipline governs what is left out. Where a report never states a travel direction, the diagram does not quietly choose one: the compass is struck through and the omission is drawn. A tool that fills silence with plausible detail is worse than no tool.

Rendered on every diagram

Reported scene, as filed by <manufacturer>;
uncorroborated.

Paired with an evidenced-ink figure per drawing: the share of rendered elements backed by a quoted phrase rather than a default. It is routinely well below one, and publishing it is the point.

Generated collision diagram
Report as filed

Hover a highlighted phrase.