Beyond Semantic Accuracy: Consequence-Aware Evaluation for Safety-Critical Language Understanding

Abstract

Can language models be trusted in safety- critical operations? In such settings, strong per- formance on semantic metrics does not guaran- tee operational reliability: a misread altitude, a dropped execution condition, or a confused call- sign may score well under standard F1 yet carry sharply asymmetric operational consequences. We study this problem in air traffic control (ATC), where controller-pilot communication demands near-zero error tolerance, and use consequence-aware evaluation to test whether semantic scores misstate operational reliabil- ity. The framework is instantiated in a con- trolled diagnostic ATC benchmark grounded in aviation standards and feedback from 40 air traffic controllers across three countries. Evaluating 8 models, we uncover a system- atic semantic-safety gap: conventional scores give substantially higher performance estimates than consequence-aware evaluation, even for models that appear reliable under standard met- rics. Risk-aware fine-tuning narrows but does not close this gap, showing that consequence- aware evaluation is a necessary complement to standard NLP metrics before any real safety- critical deployment claim