Extraction of Construction Quality Requirements from Textual Specifications via Natural Language Processing

Construction inspection is an essential component of the quality assurance programs of state transportation agencies (STAs), and the guidelines for this process reside in lengthy textual specifications. In the current practice, engineers and inspectors must manually go through these documents to plan, conduct, and document their inspections, which is time-consuming, very subjective, inconsistent, and prone to error. A promising alternative to this manual process is the application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques (e.g., text parsing, sentence classification, and syntactic analysis) to automatically extract construction inspection requirements from textual documents and present them as straightforward check questions. This paper introduces an NLP-based method that: 1) extracts individual sentences from the construction specification; 2) preprocesses the resulting sentences; 3) applies Word2Vec and GloVe algorithms to extract vector features; 4) uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network to classify sentences; and 5) converts the requirement sentences into check questions via syntactic analysis. The overall methodology was assessed using the Indiana Department of Transportation (DOT) specification as a test case. Our results revealed that the CNN + GloVe combination led to the highest accuracy, at 91.9%, and the lowest loss, at 11.7%. To further validate its use across STAs nationwide, we applied it to the construction specification of the South Carolina DOT as a test case, and our average accuracy was 92.6%.