LLM Predictive Scoring and Validation: Inferring Experience Ratings from Unstructured Text

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that GPT-4.1 can predict baseball fans' experience ratings from their open-ended responses with high accuracy, capturing overall sentiment and specific experience aspects.

Contribution

It shows that a straightforward prompt enables reliable prediction of fan ratings from unstructured text, revealing insights into evaluative judgment versus explicit ratings.

Findings

67% of predictions within +/-1 point of actual ratings

Predicted ratings align strongly with overall experience (r=0.82)

Predictions systematically lower than self-reports by about one point

Abstract

We tasked GPT-4.1 to read what baseball fans wrote about their game-day experience and predict the overall experience rating each fan gave on a 0-10 survey scale. The model received only the text of a single open-ended response. These AI predictions were compared with the actual experience ratings captured by the survey instrument across approximately 10,000 fan responses from five Major League Baseball teams. In total two-thirds of predicted ratings fell within one point of self-reported fan ratings (67% within +/-1, 36% exact match), and the predicted measurement was near-deterministic across three independent scoring runs (87% exact agreement, 99.9% within +/-1). Predicted ratings aligned most strongly with the overall experience rating (r = 0.82) rather than with any specific aspect of the game-day experience such as parking, concessions, staff, etc. However, predictions were systematically lower than self-reported ratings by approximately one point, and this gap was not driven by any single aspect. Rather, our analysis shows that self-reported ratings capture the fan's verdict, an overall evaluative judgment that integrates the entire experience. While predicted ratings quantify the impact of salient moments characterized as memorable, emotionally intense, unusual, or actionable. Each measure contains information the other misses. These baseline results establish that a simple, unoptimized prompt can directionally predict how fans rate their experience from the text a fan wrote and that a gap between the two numbers can be interpreted as a construct difference worth preserving rather than an error to eliminate.