The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially changed the artificial intelligence field, enabling its wide use over different domains. As various LLM alternatives have been developed, the current study proposes a novel decision‐support framework for evaluating and benchmarking LLMs based on multicriteria decision‐making (MCDM) techniques. In the proposed framework, an improved version of the best‐worst method (BWM) is proposed to effectively reduce the computational complexity of assigning a critical weight for the evaluation criteria of LLMs. Then, the improved BWM is integrated with the combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) method for ranking LLM alternatives. Findings show that the improved BWM successfully computes the criteria weights with low computational complexity compared to the original BWM. According to the enhanced BWM, the ‘factual errors’ criterion received the highest significant weight (0.2681), while the ‘logical inconsistencies’ criteria obtained the lowest (0.0827). The rest of the criteria were distributed in between that range. Subsequently, CoCoSo ranked the involved LLM alternatives in two different runs based on the extracted weights. Sensitivity analysis was employed to evaluate the effect of the assessment criteria on LLMs’ evaluation.

Considering the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the government and health sectors are incapable of making fast and reliable decisions, particularly given the various effects of decisions on different contexts or countries across multiple sectors. Therefore, leaders often seek decision support approaches to assist them in such scenarios. The most common decision support approach used in this regard is multiattribute decision-making (MADM). MADM can assist in enforcing the most ideal decision in the best way possible when fed with the appropriate evaluation criteria and aspects. MADM also has been of great aid to practitioners during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, MADM shows resilience in mitigating consequences in health sectors and other fields. Therefore, this study aims to analyse the rise of MADM techniques in combating COVID-19 by presenting a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art COVID-19 applications. Articles on related topics were searched in four major databases, namely, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, and Scopus, from the beginning of the pandemic in 2019 to April 2021. Articles were selected on the basis of the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the identified systematic review protocol, and a total of 51 articles were obtained after screening and filtering. All these articles were formed into a coherent taxonomy to describe the corresponding current standpoints in the literature. This taxonomy was drawn on the basis of four major categories, namely, medical (n = 30), social (n = 4), economic (n = 13) and technological (n = 4). Deep analysis for each category was performed in terms of several aspects, including issues and challenges encountered, contributions, data set, evaluation criteria, MADM techniques, evaluation and validation and bibliography analysis. This study emphasised the current standpoint and opportunities for MADM in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and promoted additional efforts towards understanding and providing new potential future directions to fulfil the needs of this study field.