NLP-Based Query-Answering System for Information

Extraction from Building Information Models

Ning Wang, S.M.ASCE 1; Raja R. A. Issa, F.ASCE 2; and Chimay J. Anumba, F.ASCE 3
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Abstract: The construction industry is information-intensive, and building information modeling (BIM) has been proposed as an infor-
mation source for supporting decision making by construction project team members in the architecture, engineering, construction, and
operation (AECO) industry. Because building information models contain more building data, further use of the aggregated building
information to support construction and operation activities has become important. In Industry 4.0, similar-to-real-life virtual assistants,
e.g., Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant, are becoming ever more popular. This research developed a query-answering (QA) system for
BIM information extraction (IE) by using natural language processing (NLP) methods to build a virtual assistant for construction project
team members. The architecture of the developed QA system for BIM IE consists of three major modules: natural language understanding, IE,
and natural language generation. A Python-based prototype application was developed based on the architecture of the QA system for BIM IE
to evaluate functionalities of the developed QA system using several BIM/industry foundation classes (IFC) models. Seven building infor-
mation models and 127 test queries were utilized to evaluate the accuracy of the developed QA system for BIM IE. The experimental results
indicated that the developed QA system for BIM IE achieved an 81.9 accuracy score. The developed NLP-based QA system for BIM is valid
to provide relatively accurate answers based on natural language queries. The contributions of this research facilitate the development of
virtual assistants in the AECO industry, and the architecture of the developed QA system can be extended to queries in other areas. DOI:
10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0001019. © 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
Author keywords: Building information modeling (BIM); Query answering (QA); Natural language processing (NLP); Industry
foundation classes; Information extraction (IE); Virtual assistant.

Introduction (Paredes-Valverde et al. 2016). The existing BIM IE efforts are

Building information modeling (BIM) has attained increasing pop-
ularity as a tool to provide information support for practitioners in
the architecture, engineering, construction, and operation (AECO)
industry. BIM not only focuses on developing the digital model of a
physical building but also aims to provide more comprehensive in-
formation acquisition services to onsite and off-site construction
personnel. However, the outcomes of the existing information ex-
traction (IE) from building information models are limited to a data
spreadsheet, an information list, and other data representations,
which require BIM users to have knowledge of the BIM data struc-
ture and experience in manipulating BIM software. Existing re-
search on BIM IE focused on obtaining structured BIM data by
using a structured query language (SQL) or SPARQL query lan-
guage request from the BIM database (Krijnen and Beetz 2018;
Niknam and Karshenas 2015; Zhang and Issa 2013). However,
BIM users will need more time to study query languages and BIM
databases. Compared with SQL and SPARQL, natural language
queries and answers are more acceptable for nonexpert users
1
Ph.D. Candidate, Rinker School of Construction Management, Univ.
of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 (corresponding author). ORCID: https://
orcid.org/0000-0003-3096-2385. Email: n.wang@ufl.edu
2
Distinguished Professor, Rinker School of Construction Management,
Univ. of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000
-0001-5193-3802. Email: raymond-issa@ufl.edu
3
Dean and Professor, College of Design, Construction, and Planning,
Univ. of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. Email: anumba@ufl.edu
Note. This manuscript was submitted on July 23, 2021; approved on
December 21, 2021; published online on February 21, 2022. Discussion
period open until July 21, 2022; separate discussions must be submitted
for individual papers. This paper is part of the Journal of Computing
in Civil Engineering, © ASCE, ISSN 0887-3801.
limited in recognizing natural language queries and generating
corresponding natural language responses. In addition, with the
increase in data size and complexity of models and software func-
tions, BIM users will need more time to study BIM software and
tools, and the process of information acquisition will become more
difficult (Lin et al. 2016).
In the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), an increasing
number of systems and companies are conducting research on
developing natural language–based virtual assistants or query-
answering (QA) systems to support daily life, such as Apple
Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, IBM Watson, Microsoft
Cortana, and Nvidia Jarvis. QA systems aim to develop a human–
machine interactive dialogue system to provide information support
to humans (Park and Kang 2019). However, existing research
on QA for IE from building information models is limited.
A QA system for BIM IE can provide natural language–based in-
formation acquisition from building information models. Natural
language processing (NLP) is used to enable a machine to imitate
natural human language capabilities and is used to build a natural
language–based virtual assistant to support daily work activities.
This research aims to use NLP methods to develop a QA system
for BIM IE. The virtual assistant for BIM IE requires (1) analyzing
a natural human language query and identifying different types of
content words from the query; (2) locating target structured build-
ing information from a BIM data repository, based on the identified
and classified content words; and (3) transforming structured infor-
mation into a natural human response. This paper describes the re-
search undertaken to achieve the aforementioned goals. It starts
with a “Literature Review” section that explains the key terminol-
ogy and background knowledge used and describes the state of the
art of research on BIM IE. Following the literature review, the

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J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 2022, 36(3): 04022004

 “Methodology” section presents the approach taken to develop the
QA system for BIM IE, including the system architecture. The de-
veloped system is comprised of three major modules: natural lan-
guage understanding (NLU), IE, and natural language generation
(NLG). The developed system utilizes the industry foundation
classes (IFC) data format as the information repository for building
information models because it is a widely supported, open-source
BIM specification in the AECO industry.
The NLU module was developed to use semantic and syntactic
NLP methods to recognize the types of natural language queries
and identify different types of content words from queries. The IE
module uses these content words to locate the target IFC informa-
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tion and extract the IFC instance data. The IE module directly ex-
tracts property information from BIM architectural and structural
models without complex reasoning and computation. The NLG
module generates the corresponding natural language response
based on the structured information from the NLU and IE modules.
The algorithms for the three modules were developed in this re-
search. A Python-based prototype application was developed based
on the architecture of the developed QA system for BIM. Seven
BIM/IFC architectural/structural models and 127 natural language
queries were used to test the functionalities and accuracy of the
developed QA system for BIM. Comparisons were performed to
illustrate the differences between the developed BIM IE system
and other related IE methods. The developed QA system for BIM
IE will help facilitate the development of other virtual assistants in
the AECO industry.
Literature Review
Industry Foundation Classes
IFC is one of the most popular BIM data exchange specifications
for different BIM software platforms in the AECO industry. buil-
dingSMART International (bSI) proposed IFC as the international
standard [ISO 16739-1:2018 (ISO 2018)] for a BIM data share
and exchange format. Because the IFC specification is open-source
and easily accessible, data in a BIM/IFC model can be accessed,
checked, and freely modified without any license (Wang and Issa
2019). IFC was developed based on the Standard for the Exchange
of Product model data (ISO-STEP) EXPRESS data modeling lan-
guage (buildingSMART 2019). The EXPRESS language is a product
data specification language defined by ISO standard (ISO 2004).
IFC4 Addendum 2 Technical Corrigendum 1 (IFC4 ADD2 TC1)
is the most stable and official version of the IFC specification. There-
fore, this research used the IFC version IFC4 ADD2 TC1. IFC4
ADD2 TC1 [ISO 16739-1:2018 (ISO 2018)] was published in 2017,
and contains 776 entities, 420 property sets, 93 quantities sets, and
130 defined data types (buildingSMART 2017). One STEP-IFC file
is comprised of two sections of information: header and data. The
header section defines the basic information, like Model View
Definition (MVD). The data section contains considerable building
components information, like three-dimensional (3D) topological
data.
BIM Information Extraction
Building information searching and retrieval involve many time-
consuming tasks (Sacks et al. 2018). The related application areas
of information acquisition from BIM include model compliance
check (Zhang and El-Gohary 2015, 2016), model comparison
(Ghang et al. 2011; Shi et al. 2018), data retrieval (Lin et al. 2016;
Liu et al. 2016), partial model extraction (Jongsung et al. 2013;
Zhang and Issa 2013), and data interoperability and integration
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(Karan et al. 2016; Nepal et al. 2013). The outcomes of existing
research and applications for BIM information acquisition can be
summarized into three categories: (1) spreadsheets that contain all
relevant building information based on the different ontology do-
mains (Lin et al. 2016); (2) partial BIM/IFC model codes for the
purpose of sharing, visualizing, and comparing (Jongsung et al.
2013; Zhang and Issa 2013); and (3) organized and retrieved infor-
mation representation and data structure for model checks, data inter-
operability, or data retrieval use (Zhang and El-Gohary 2015, 2016).
Existing research on QA for IE from building information mod-
els is limited, so this paper utilized related works for demonstration.
Some research has used the Resource Description Framework
(RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) as BIM/IFC reposito-
ries and SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF query language) as
the query language to get a relevant BIM data spreadsheet from the
BIM RDF or OWL database for information retrieval (Karan et al.
2016; Liu et al. 2016; Studer et al. 2007). However, SPARQL and
ontology language are not easily understood by construction per-
sonnel. BIM RDF/OWL research requires transforming building
data from BIM/IFC into a RDF or OWL data format, which is a
time-consuming and complicated process, and users are required to
have experience in RDF/OWL. Moreover, the storage size of an
RDF or OWL file is much larger than its corresponding BIM/
IFC file (buildingSMART 2019; Krijnen and Beetz 2018).
Lin et al. (2016) proposed an NLP-based BIM framework for
information retrieval. Their research utilized syntactic NLP as a
tool to extract keywords from natural language requests. However,
in their approach, after the part-of-speech (POS) tagging of natural
language, the classification of concept and property words in a sen-
tence depended on keyword direct mapping with the IFC dictionary
library, which restricted the word selection of queries. Zhang and
El-Gohary (2015) developed an automated IE from BIM, transform-
ing it into semantic logic–based data representation for automated
compliance checking (ACC) of building information models. Their
research was based on first-order logic (FOL), which is the most
prominent and fundamental logical formalism for semantic NLP
use. Their research outcome was a logic-based information represen-
tation that was close to natural language.
The general purpose of existing research on BIM information
acquisition was to provide information support for AECO activ-
ities, but the research results are difficult for AECO personnel with
limited BIM experience to interpret. Natural language queries and
outcomes are expected to be more acceptable to nonexpert BIM
users (Paredes-Valverde et al. 2016). The QA for BIM research
compared the proposed IE methodology with the related research
of Zhang and El-Gohary (2015), Lin et al. (2016), and Karan et al.
(2016) in the “Discussion” section. The reason for comparing the
proposed methodology with the aforementioned studies was that
they focused on information retrieval or extraction requests from
building information models, which is related to the BIM IE in this
QA for BIM research.
Natural Language Processing
Existing QA applications in building information acquisition have
been limited. This research proposed a QA system to mimic lan-
guage capabilities in providing building information. To achieve
mimicking natural language capabilities, this research used NLP
methods (i.e., semantic, and syntactic analysis) instead of machine
learning methods. Machine learning (ML) is one of the most popu-
lar approaches to process a large volume of raw data to make pre-
dictions. ML-based QA systems require a large size of textual
dialogue for training and testing purposes, but such training data
for the AECO industry are very limited. Therefore, this research
J. Comput. Civ. Eng.
 utilized NLP methods for the understanding and generation of natu-
ral language. NLP aims to process natural language, which enables
a machine to mimic human language capabilities (Cherpas 1992;
Zhang and El-Gohary 2015). The major research on NLP focused
on semantic features and syntactic rules and structures within a
natural language sentence. Semantic NLP focuses on processing
the literal meaning of natural language. Syntactic NLP deals with
the grammar structure of a sentence. There are two major applica-
tion areas of NLP: NLU and NLG to implement the semantic and
syntactic analysis.
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Natural Language Understanding
NLU is a subfield of NLP focused on getting a machine to identify
and interpret natural language. NLU is widely applied for informa-
tion retrieval, information extraction, text classification, and query-
answering systems (Mujtaba and Mahapatra 2019). NLU is also a
core component of a virtual assistant system (Zheng et al. 2020).
NLU enables a machine to process natural language inputs. This
research utilized semantic and syntactic analysis to process natural
language understanding. In computational linguistics, NLU also
deals with synonyms. Similar to Wu et al. (2019) and Zhang
and El-Gohary (2016), this QA for BIM research utilized WordNet
(2020) to deal with synonyms.
Natural Language Generation
A natural language response is required for a query-answering sys-
tem or a virtual assistant (Park and Kang 2019; Su and Chen 2019).
NLG was developed to generate such natural language responses.
NLG is a subtopic of NLP, which focuses on processing syntactic
features within natural language. NLG is able to transform struc-
tured data into natural language, which is also the basic concept of
IE. NLG was developed to describe structured data via textual rep-
resentation (i.e., natural language representation), which can be
easily understood by humans.
In general, the process of NLG needs six dependent elements:
content determination, discourse planning, sentence aggregation,
lexicalization, referring expression generation, and linguistic reali-
zation (Montenegro et al. 2018). As for the QA system, those six
elements can be categorized into semantic content and syntactic
structure (Wang and Issa 2020). In NLG, the semantic content
is extracted from structured data. The syntactic sentence structure
is a grammar rule in a natural language sentence, which can be
represented by POS tagging. The generation of natural language
requires grammar rules and syntactic structure to form a sentence.
The grammar syntax is also required for the processing of NLU.
Fig. 1. Grammar tree: phrase structure in a sentence.
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Grammar Syntax and Part of Speech
The syntactic sentence structure or POS tagging is the key to NLU
and NLG (Li et al. 2019). The underlying sentence structure of natu-
ral human language in English is the subject-verb-object (S-V-O)
syntactic word order (Celce-Murcia et al. 1999). A phrase structure
is a basic component to form the S-V-O sentence structure, and the
phrase structure provides rules to demonstrate three indispensable
parts of the S-V-O sentence structure. The phrase categories of gram-
mar syntax in a sentence include noun phrase (NP), verb phrase
(VP), and prepositional phrase (PP). NP and VP are the two basic
phrase structures to represent a sentence (i.e., NP + VP), in which NP
stands for the subject and VP summarizes the verb and object parts.
To form the phrase structure of a sentence, English vocabularies are
required, including noun, determiner, adjective, verb, adverb, prepo-
sition, and conjunction. Noun, adjective, verb, and adverb are con-
tent words, whereas determiner, preposition, and conjunction are
function words in English grammar syntax. Content words carry ac-
tual meaning, whereas function words serve grammatical functions.
In the process of NLP, POS tagging is applied to tag different
elements in a sentence, like noun, verb, and adjective. Penn Tree-
bank POS tags are one of the most popular POS taggers for NLP
(Penn Treebank 2003). A grammar tree is utilized to visualize the
phrase structure and POS tags in a sentence. Fig. 1 shows a gram-
mar tree for an example sentence of “The elevation of the second
level is 10 feet.” In this grammar tree, the root is the sentence (S),
and there are several routes from the root to the leaves. The under-
lying phrase structure is the type of NP + VP, and forming a phrase
structure is based on the end node, which are word types, such as
noun (NN), determiner (DT), and preposition (IN). The syntactic
structure or sentence segmentation is the fundamental linguistic and
grammar basis for NLP (Lin et al. 2016; Wu et al. 2019). Therefore,
this research implemented POS tagging to analyze natural language
input (i.e., NLU), and the phrase structure of NP + VP was utilized
to generate natural human language based on the BIM/IFC model
data (i.e., NLG).
Methodology
The goal of the QA system for BIM is to provide BIM users with
natural language queries and answers. For example, a project man-
ager can type in a natural language query like “What is the height of
the second floor?,” and the QA system can answer to the project
manager via natural language, like “The height of the second floor
is 10 feet.” The QA system for BIM can be considered as a virtual
assistant for project managers to obtain useful building information
J. Comput. Civ. Eng.
 from BIM. BIM users can utilize a textual natural language ques-
tion to query the developed system, and the QA system for BIM can
provide users with natural language responses. Because there are
many types of information aggregated in a BIM/IFC model, such
as architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing in-
formation, this research focused on building data from the archi-
tectural and structural BIM/IFC models. The target information
included building components property information (e.g., property
object types), geometric information (e.g., floor elevation), and ba-
sic model information (e.g., model creation date). To achieve the
research goal, the architecture of the NLP-based QA system for
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BIM IE was designed and developed to consist of three major mod-
ules: NLU, IE, and NLG. Fig. 2 shows the basic architecture of the
developed system.
Due to the limited AECO training and testing data available, this
research implemented grammar and syntax analysis for NLU and
NLG. The NLU module was used to understand and classify the
input textual natural language query. NLU aimed to identify differ-
ent content words within the natural language query and output
words with classification to the IE module. The IE module was
developed to locate the queried building information and extract
the corresponding structured IFC data from the BIM/IFC model
based on classified content words. This module aimed to directly
extract such information from BIM/IFC models without computa-
tion and ontology reasoning. This research focused on the basic
model and attribute information of IfcBuildingElements and IfcSpa-
tialStructureElements from an architectural/structural building in-
formation model, including IfcDoor, IfcWindow, IfcBuildingStorey,
IfcWall, IfcBeam, IfcRoof, IfcColumn, IfcSlab, IfcSpace, and Ifc-
Stair. A NLG module was finally implemented to transform the
structured IFC data into a natural language response.
A Python-based prototype application was developed based on
the architecture of the QA system for BIM IE. NLU, IE, and NLG
were programmed and developed in isolated modules so that the
main system can call different modular functions. The schema
of the input IFC file is IFC4 ADD2 TC1, and the MVD is the de-
sign transfer view. After the developed QA system for BIM IE re-
ceives the natural language query text, the first step is to identify the
target IFC section by the NLU module because the data structures
of the IFC header and data sections are different. To better extract
IFC data and generate natural language answers, the NLU module
requires checking the queried IFC type. Although the information
within the header section is simple, it also contains important model
data. For example, users need the model creation date because there
Fig. 2. NLP-based QA system for BIM IE.
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might be many versions of a model. Building models are com-
monly changed, and users need to track the version of the model.
The model creation date provides the version information. Also, the
host information provides users a contact person for communica-
tion. For a large construction project, it is difficult to know the
responsible person for the building information model. For differ-
ent IFC sections, the detailed algorithms for NLU, IE, and NLG are
different. For example, if the input query is asking for header sec-
tion information, like the IFC file creation date, one phrase from the
input query will be used to search IFC data and generate a natural
language answer. However, most times, the input query is requesting
building information from the data section because the data section
contains more building data. In this scenario, three types of phrases
and words were identified and classified by the NLU model, and
those phrases are the major indexes to find the target structured IFC
data and key components to generate the corresponding natural lan-
guage responses.
Natural Language Understanding Module
The goal of the developed NLU module was to identify and classify
content words from the natural language query. Fig. 3 illustrates the
NLU algorithm for the developed QA system for BIM IE. After a
natural language query is inputted into the system, the first job is to
tokenize and POS tag the input query. For example, if the query is
“What is the height of the second floor?,” the output of tokenization
and POS tag is to show the POS tags for each word, like (‘what’,
‘WP’), (‘is’ ‘VBZ’), (‘the’, ‘DT’), (‘height’, ‘NN’), (‘of’, ‘IN’),
(‘the’, ‘DT’), (‘second’, ‘JJ’), (‘floor’, ‘NN’), (‘?’, ‘.’) (Figs. 4
and 5).
There are many tools for tokenization and POS tagging for
NLU. For example, the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is a lead-
ing platform of the Python library to process natural language, such
as tokenizing, tagging, and stemming (Bird et al. 2009). The Penn
Treebank tag set is used by the NLTK library. Therefore, this re-
search utilized NLTK to label each input word with a Penn Tree-
bank POS tagger.
Based on the tagged query, the next job was to check the queried
IFC section. For better generating the corresponding natural lan-
guage response, the target queried IFC section is necessary. The
syntactic word dependencies within the tagged query were ana-
lyzed. Fig. 6 shows the syntax tree of a query example “What
is the object of door 302?,” which is regarding the IFC data section.
The child node NP (i.e., the object of door 302) in the parent node
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Fig. 3. NLU algorithm for QA system for BIM.

Fig. 4. NLU classification of query for IFC header section.

Fig. 5. NLU classification of query for IFC data section. Fig. 6. Syntax tree: word dependencies in a sentence.

VP consists of a NP and a PP, and the node PP (i.e., of door 302)
depends on the node NP (i.e., the object). This research used syn-
tactic word dependencies to differentiate queries for the IFC header
and data section. For example, the query “What is the model cre-
ation date?” regarded the model information from the header sec-
tion, and there was no word dependency relationship between a NP
and a PP, whereas the query for the data section will contain a word
dependencies relationship between a NP and a PP, like the example
query shown in Fig. 6. For queries like “What is the creation date of
the model?,” although the query contains a word dependency rela-
tionship between a NP and a PP, the information within the PP “of
the model” is unnecessary for NLU. Therefore, this research
eliminated such useless PPs (e.g., “in the building information
model”) before NLU.
The criteria to distinguish such useless PPs and useful PPs in
natural language queries was that there was no building element
information within the PP. The PP in the query regarding the IFC
data section will contain building element information, for exam-
ple, the “third floor” and “door 17.” After the target IFC section was
determined, the next job was to find all content words within the
query because content words carry the actual meaning. For the
queries for the header section, only nouns are the content words,
so the combination of the nouns is the target to be identified (Fig. 4).
In this research, the combination of the nouns became the keyword

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 phrase returned to the main program. In this scenario, the NLU
module aimed to find the keyword phrase for the IE module use.
If the query contained a syntactic word dependency relationship
between a NP and a PP, the target was the IFC data section. In this
scenario, the keyword phrase was not suitable for BIM IE, but the
content words were still the target of the NLU module. For the ex-
ample query “What is the height of the second floor?,” content
words include nouns and adjectives. However, content words carry
different semantic meanings. “Height” and “floor” are nouns, but
“height” is to express an attribute of a building component, whereas
“floor” is the type of the building component. In this research,
“height” can be classified as an attribute word, whereas the other
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noun “floor” is a type word (Fig. 5). The type word is used to locate
the IFC instance type (e.g., IfcBuildingStorey), and the attribute
word is the index to find the corresponding IFC instance attribute
name (e.g., elevation).
Although attribute word and type word have the same POS tag
NN in a syntax tree, the node type word and the node attribute word
have the same parent node, and the type word (i.e., in a PP) depends
on the attribute word (i.e., in a NP). After identifying all nouns
within the natural language input, the NLU module requires check-
ing if the noun is in a PP, which depends on a NP. If not, the noun is
the attribute word and returns to the main program. If a noun is in a
PP, the NLU module will return the noun as a type word. In addi-
tion, the content word adjective is combined with the type word as
a name phrase, which is utilized to locate the exact IFC instance
(e.g., find “second floor” in all IfcBuildingStorey types). Some-
times, users may use a cardinal number instead of an adjective.
For example, “level 2” has the same meaning as the “second floor.”
If there is no adjective in the natural language input, the cardinal
number can be considered as a content word. In the latter scenario,
the NLU module was developed to identify the attribute word, type
word, and name phrase returned to the main program.
Information Extraction Module
The IE module aims to locate the queried structured IFC data within
an IFC-STEP file based on all classified keywords from the NLU
module. The scope of this module was to directly extract IFC data
without complex computation and reasoning. The IE algorithms for
the IFC header and data section were different due to the different
data structures. The data representation of the header section was an
attribute name with an attribute value (e.g., Schema: IFC4), whereas
that of the data section is comprised of IFC instance ID, instance
type, and multiple attribute values (e.g., #164=IFCBUILDING-
STOREY (‘0KoSqKsC516fss_6JNUq13’,#42,‘Second Floor’, $,
‘Level: 1/4” Head’, #163, $,‘Second Floor’,.ELEMENT.,10). The
corresponding attribute names were defined by the EXPRESS mod-
eling language of the IFC4 ADD2 TC1 schema.
For example, the attribute names of an IfcBuildingStorey include
GlobalId, OwnerHistory, Name, Description, Object Type, Object
Placement, Representation, Long Name, Composition Type, and
Elevation (buildingSMART 2020). This module is comprised of
two categories: IE for the IFC header section and IE for the data
section. The method of header IE is vectorization to compare
the cosine similarity between keyword phrase and each line in
the header section. The vectorization method was based on term
frequency (TF) using the Bag of Words (BoW) (Manning et al.
2008). The TF using the BoW (TF-BoW) method builds a corpus
for the two texts (i.e., keyword phrase and each header line) and
converts the two texts into two vectors, and the measurement was
cosine similarity between these two vectors. The cosine similarity
between the two vectors is computed by Eq. (1), which was derived
from the dot product of two vectors (Spiegel et al. 2009)
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A·B
Cosine similarity ¼ cosðθÞ ¼
kAk · kBk
Pn
i¼1 Ai · Bi
¼ pP ffi pP
ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ð1Þ
n A2 · n 2
i¼1 i n¼1 Bi
where Ai and Bi = components of two vectors A and B.
The range of cosine similarity is from −1 to 1, where −1 means
the two vectors are exactly opposite, and 1 means the two vectors
are the same. In this research, the cosine similarity between the
vectors should range from 0 to 1, and the highest cosine similarity
means they are more similar. The line in the header section with the
highest cosine similarity will be extracted. This research utilized
the CountVectorizer and cosine similarity functions from the
sciki-learn Python package. For example, if the keyword phrase
is “model date,” the outcome of this function is the line “* Model
creation date: Sat Jun 06 21:40:32 2020” with the highest cosine
similarity. The TF using the BoW method is based on word fre-
quency between texts, which cannot be used for semantic similarity
comparison.
Fig. 7 shows the IE algorithm for the queries regarding the IFC
data section. To locate the target IFC data instance, the type of the
IFC instance is required. Type word from the NLU module is uti-
lized to find such IFC instance type. This system is to match the
type word with all supported instance types (i.e., IfcBuildingEle-
ment and IfcSpatialStructureElement) within an IFC-STEP file.
Some researchers have used the IFC dictionary library or buil-
dingSMART Data Dictionary (bSDD) to develop a mapping chart
of the keyword. However, a specific IFC-STEP file may not contain
all instance types. Using the list of all supported instance types
from the target IFC-STEP file to match the keywords can improve
the efficiency of locating the target IFC instance type. Therefore,
for the data IE, the developed module was to extract all supported
instance types into an all-type list and then to check if the type word
is a substring of an IFC instance type in the all-type list.
In a real-world scenario, the type word is not the same as a sub-
string because the naming convention of IFC instance types was
designed for BIM software use instead of natural language use.
For example, in a real-world situation, a BIM user may utilize
“floor” instead of “IfcBuildingStorey,” and “floor” is not a substring
of “IfcBuildingStorey.” Users may use different type words to
express the same meaning like “level” or “floor” for “IfcBuilding-
Storey.” In this scenario, the BIM synonyms function was devel-
oped to find synonyms of type word based on the NLTK WordNet
Python package. The BIM synonyms function used the type word
(e.g., floor) to find all synonyms (e.g., level, story, and so on) in
WordNet, and check whether one of the synonyms is a substring of
an IFC instance type in the all-type list.
After the module identified the target IFC instance type (e.g., Ifc-
BuildingStorey), the next job was to locate the exact IFC instance
(e.g., second floor). The name phrase from the NLU module was
used to find the target IFC instance. This research also utilized the
TF-BoW method to vectorize phrases and computed the cosine
similarity between the name phrase and the “name” of each IFC
instance in the target type. The “name” is one of the attribute names
of IfcBuildingElement and IfcSpatialStructureElement based on the
IFC4 schema. The IFC instance with the highest cosine similarity
will be extracted. For example, if the type word is “floor” and name
phrase is “second floor”, the IFC instance with the highest cosine
similarity is “#164= IFCBUILDINGSTOREY (‘0KoSqKsC516fss
_6JNUq13’, #42, ‘second level’, $, ‘Level:1/4” Head’, #163, $,
‘second level’,.ELEMENT., 10).” The IE module only extracts par-
tial data from the extracted IFC instance for NLG, for example,
J. Comput. Civ. Eng.
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by SUNGKYUNKWAN UNIVERSITY on 03/28/22. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.

Fig. 7. IE algorithm for queries regarding data section.

only the “height” information is queried by the user. Therefore, the
corresponding attribute value is required to be extracted.
The IFC schema was used to find the attribute value of the IFC
instance. The IE module aims to use the attribute word to match
each attribute name from the IFC instance; each IFC type may have
different attribute names. The IFC4 ADD2 TC1 schema was com-
plied with to get corresponding attribute names of the target IFC
instance. Once the attribute word matches the attribute name of the
IFC instance, the corresponding attribute value will be extracted.
However, system users may use “height” to express the “elevation”
of the target IfcBuildingStorey. In this scenario, the BIM synonyms
function will be implemented to find synonyms of “height” to match
the attribute name “elevation” from the IFC schema. The outcome of
the IE module is the extracted attribute value.
Natural Language Generation Module
The NLG module aims to generate a natural language answer based
on structured information from the NLU and IE modules. Table 1
provides the syntactic NLG patterns and NLG examples. The pat-
terns were developed based on the underlying phrase structure of
NP + VP from the basic English grammar syntax. The NLG pattern
of the IFC header data is DT NN VBZ NN/CD where DT NN is NP,
VBZ NN/CD is VP, and the NLG pattern of the IFC data section is
DT NN IN DT NN VBZ NN/CD, where DT NN IN DT NN is NP
and VBZ NN/CD is VP.
The two patterns of natural language generation were based on
IFC data structure: Pattern P1 is for the IFC header section and
Pattern P2 is for the IFC data section. In Pattern P1, the X 1 repre-
sents the NLU keyword phrase, and the X 2 stands for the corre-
sponding attribute value. In Pattern P2, Y represents the NLU
attribute word, X 1 is the NLU name phase, and X 2 is the corre-
sponding attribute value. The attribute values could be a noun or
cardinal number. If the attribute value is a cardinal number, a unit
word is required for the natural language response. The unit word
can be extracted from the entity IfcConversionBasedUnit, and the
imperial unit “Foot” is commonly used in building elements. In the
meantime, the autonomous pluralization of the unit word was con-
sidered in the process of NLG. The rest of the NLG format is the
preset language pattern, such as determiner and preposition. For
example, if the input query is “What is the height of the second
floor?,” the attribute word is “height”, and the name phrase is

Table 1. Syntactic NLG patterns and formats

Pattern number IFC type NLG pattern NLG format NLG example
P1 Header DT NN VBZ NN/CDa The X 1 is X 2 b The schema is IFC4.
P2 Data DT NN IN DT NN VBZ NN/CD NN/NNSa The Y of the X 1 is X 2 c The height of the second floor is 10 feet.
a
DT = determiner; NN = noun (singular); VBZ = verb; CD = cardinal number; IN = preposition; and NNS = noun (plural).
b
X 1 = keyword phrase; and X 2 = corresponding attribute value.
c
Y = attribute word; X 1 = name phase; and X 2 = corresponding attribute value.

© ASCE 04022004-7 J. Comput. Civ. Eng.

J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 2022, 36(3): 04022004

 “second floor”. The corresponding attribute value is 10 extracted
from the target IfcBuildingStorey instance. The natural language
response is generated by these words, and the outcome is “The
height of the second floor is 10 feet.”
Based on the syntactic NLP patterns and IFC schema, the NLG
module converts the structured BIM/IFC data into a natural lan-
guage response. The first step is to input all keywords from the
NLU module, input the extracted IFC instance code from the IE
module, and initialize all variables for the preset NLG patterns.
The type of IFC instance is an indispensable and contributing factor
to determining the format of the NLG patterns. If the IFC instance
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belongs to the header part, the keyword phrase and the queried attrib-
ute value are utilized to generate natural language for pattern P1. If
the instance is within the IFC data section the natural language sen-
tence is generated based on attribute word, name phrase, and attribute
value in the NLG Pattern P2. The NLG module returns the generated
natural language response to the main program and outputs the result
for the system user. The generated natural language is the outcome of
the developed QA system for BIM.
Evaluation and Results
The Python-based prototype application was developed based on
the architecture of the QA system for BIM IE. The developed
Python Package IfcReader version 1.0.0 parses IFC data and
was published on the GitHub repository 1. IfcReader helps to ex-
tract organized data from IFC files. The open-source NLTK library
was used to achieve the research goal. Three BIM/IFC sample mod-
els, namely the Sample architectural model 1 (16 KB), VDC Center
Architecture (14.6 MB), and VDC Center Structure (13.1 MB), and
four actual architectural/structural models, namely Rinker Building
Architecture (26.8 MB), Rinker Building Structure (2.31 MB), an
Airport Building Architecture (40.7 MB), and an Airport building
Structure (3.43 MB), were utilized to validate the functions of
each module in the prototype application. All BIM/IFC models
were exported in the Design Transfer View of the IFC4 ADD2
TC1 schema from the BIM authoring tool Autodesk Revit 2021.
The hardware environment used to evaluate the prototype applica-
tion was an Intel Core i7-10700 CPU of 2.90 GHz with eight cores
and 32.0 GB RAM.
Fig. 8 shows two example results of the prototype application in
the PyCharm interface. The queries were “model’s date” and “What
Fig. 8. Example result of prototype application in PyCharm.
© ASCE 04022004-8
J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 2022, 36(3): 04022004
is the height of the second level?” The developed NLU module
recognized the queried IFC section and identified the keyword
phrase, attribute word, type word, and name phrase from queries.
The identified “height,” “level,” “second level” were extracted for
evaluating the accuracy of the NLU module. The IE module used
these three indexes to extract the code of the target IFC instance.
Also, the target IFC data was extracted to evaluate the accuracy of
the IE module. The NLG module transformed the structured infor-
mation into a natural language answer. Based on the predefined
syntactic NLG pattern for the IFC data section, the generated natu-
ral language response was mainly comprised of NP and VP struc-
tures. In the NP part of generated natural language, the phrase
structure is “the <attribute word> of the <name phrase>”. The
VP represents the verb phrase structure of “is <attribute value>.”
This research generated 127 test queries with corresponding
building information models’ names to test the accuracy of the de-
veloped prototype. The 127 queries were developed based on the
IFC4 schema. For example, an IfcBuildingStorey “level 1” included
the attribute “elevation,” one natural language query can be generated
“What is the elevation of the level 1?”. There were 127 queries were
generated based on this logic including 20 basic model information
queries (e.g., model creation date), 23 IfcDoor queries, 16 IfcWindow
queries, 21 IfcBuildingStorey queries, 9 IfcWall, 6 IfcStair, 9 Ifc-
Space, 6 IfcBeam, 6 IfcColumn, 6 IfcSlab, and 5 IfcRoof. Each natural
language query was linked with the corresponding building informa-
tion model’s name. Also, this research collected the corresponding
ground truth (i.e., natural language answer) based on NLP patterns
for each query, which was used to compute the accuracy.
This research recorded each extracted natural language answer to
compare with the ground truth to account for whether the predicted
answer matched with the ground truth. The collected extracted an-
swers were cleaned by removing extra spaces, and together with the
ground truths, they were converted to lower case in preparation for
accuracy computations. The accuracy was computed by the accuracy
score function from scikit-learn. The experiment results showed an
81.9 accuracy score, which means 104 predictions exactly matched
their ground truths. There were 23 failed predictions during the val-
idation. The reason for those failed predictions was that the attribute
word was wrongly matched with the target IFC instance by the vec-
torization methods with the highest cosine similarity. Test queries,
corresponding building information model’s name, ground truth,
and predictions were published on GitHub repository 2.
J. Comput. Civ. Eng.
 Discussion
The evaluation results indicated that the developed Python-based
prototype application enabled understanding of the natural lan-
guage query, extracting corresponding IFC attribute information,
and transforming the structured information into a natural language
response. The developed prototype could provide BIM users with
model information with an accuracy score of 81.9%. The prototype
application was able to generate a natural language answer for BIM
users based on their queries. The human performance on a general
QA task is 86.8% (Rajpurkar et al. 2018), and the developed QA
system for BIM is only 4.9 points lower than that of humans. The
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experimental results indicated that the developed methodology for
the NLP-based QA system for BIM IE is valid to give a relatively
accurate natural language answer based on the user’s query.
Compared with the regular BIM IE method, the developed QA
system for BIM can provide BIM users with a natural language input
option. The developed QA system for BIM IE can identify content
words to extract the target IFC data and generate the corresponding
natural language response back to the user. A comparison between
the developed methodology and the related BIM IE approaches was
conducted to show the differences (Table 2). Although those studies
were not focused on building a QA system for BIM IE, they aimed to
acquire building information from BIM, which was relevant to this
research. The developed system used BIM/IFC models as the BIM
data repository, which can reduce the time to convert IFC-STEP files
into other formats and save more storage space than other databases
(DB) and OWL/RDF formats.
For the NLU part, the developed methodology utilized semantic
and syntactic NLP methods to identify different types of keywords.
For the BIME IE part, the developed QA system used vectorization
with the cosine similarity method. For the NLG part, the developed
system used syntax grammar and POS to generate corresponding
natural language responses. For the outcome, other related research
generated different BIM information representations for the pur-
poses of model checks (Zhang and El-Gohary 2015), information
retrieval (Lin et al. 2016), or data interoperability and integration
(Karan et al. 2016). Compared with those outcomes of existing re-
search, natural language responses are more acceptable by nonre-
gular BIM users, and software manipulation and data structure are
not required for the developed system.
Traditional virtual assistants were designed to detect exact key-
words to recognize the information from the natural language input
(Kobayashi et al. 2019). For example, some keywords like calendar
were used in the traditional QA system to fulfill relevant calendar
jobs from users. The developed QA system for BIM aims to pro-
vide BIM users with more input options instead of using exact key-
words to restrict the inputs. For example, a project manager who
wants to find out height information about a door annotated as 312
on the drawings can use natural language questions like “What is
the height of door 312?” to query the QA system for BIM. The
developed system can answer the project manager via natural
Table 2. Comparison between developed BIM IE and other related IE
Categories QA for BIM IE Zhang and El-Gohary (2015)
Input query Textual natural language None
BIM repository type IFC IFC
BIM repository Not necessary Not necessary
transformation
NLU Yes (NLP) Not necessary
Information searching Vectorization Not necessary
NLG Yes (NLP) Not necessary
Outcome result Natural language response Data representation (logic facts)
© ASCE 04022004-9
J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 2022, 36(3): 04022004
language sentences, like “The height of door 312 is 6.67 feet.”
The system can be considered as a virtual assistant or chatbot
for the project manager to obtain useful building information from
BIM. The developed BIM system can assist the project manager to
save more time in finding accurate building information, and does
not even require the project manager to understand the complex
manipulation of BIM software.
The developed methodology still has limitations. Because this re-
search used NLP syntactic analysis instead of machine learning
methods, the queries have a similar pattern. Machine learning can
provide a more intelligent way of analyzing queries with different
patterns. However, there are no such training data for this process.
Existing training and testing data for the QA development are more
generalized text data for a general purpose. Such custom training
data for the AECO industry are limited. Building such a data set
is one of the proposed future research directions. To better under-
stand input natural language queries with fewer restrictions, deep-
learning methods, like artificial neural networks, can provide a good
solution to expand the flexibility of the NLU module in analyzing
more unstructured queries. Google has improved the Google Assis-
tant by using deep neural network methods (Kepuska and Bohouta
2018). Deep learning is the future direction of the developed meth-
odology. The developed IE module directly extracts architectural
property information without computation and reasoning, but in
other scenarios, users may query “Tell me the width of the bedroom
window in Apartment 101.” There is an ontology relation between
the bedroom window and Apartment 101. The ontology-based IE
method is also one of the future directions of this research to provide
a more intelligent IE with reasoning capability. The developed NLP-
based QA for BIM IE is structured, and each module can be readily
substituted in future efforts.
Conclusions
With the development of information technologies, many organi-
zations and companies have focused their research on developing
natural language–based virtual assistants to provide comprehensive
information services to support daily life. Existing BIM IE methods
require users to have knowledge of the BIM software data structure
and be experienced in manipulating BIM software, and SQL or
SPARQL query languages. However, BIM involves AECO users
from different domains of interest and many construction practi-
tioners with limited experience in BIM and query languages, who
all require useful building information to support their construction
and operation activities. A natural language–based QA system for
BIM IE that allows them to use natural language queries to extract
useful building information becomes very important to these users.
To fill this gap, this research developed a natural language–based
QA system for BIM IE using NLP methods. The developed QA
system can identify and classify content words in natural language
queries and generate the corresponding natural language responses.
Lin et al. (2016) Karan et al. (2016)
Textual natural language SPARQL
MongoDB OWL/RDF
Yes (IFC serialization) Yes
Yes (NLP) Not necessary
IFC keyword mapping Structured query
None Not necessary
Spreadsheets and model visualization Data spreadsheets
J. Comput. Civ. Eng.
 A Python-based prototype application was developed based on the
architecture of the QA system for BIM IE to evaluate the developed
system.
The QA system can provide relatively accurate responses for
information support for construction project team members. The
developed QA system can be considered as a virtual assistant to pro-
vide comprehensive building information for users. For example, an
onsite project manager can type in a natural language query on their
smartphone, and the developed QA system for BIM can generate a
natural language answer for the project manager. The developed
methodology still has limitations in recognizing natural language
queries with complex syntax. To enable machine learning–based
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NLU, future research will develop a data set of building informa-
tion–related natural language queries for training and testing.
The deep neural network method is the future research direction
for the NLU module to understand building information–related
natural language queries with more complex syntax. An ontology-
based IE module is also a future research direction to provide a
more advanced IE method for reasoning. In addition, there are other
semantic relations between key phrases and IFC entities. For ex-
ample, second floor provides similar semantics to level 2. A deep
learning–based semantic similarity comparison method will be
used in future research. The algorithms for the NLU, IE, and NLG
modules need to be refined to improve the accuracy and intelli-
gence of each module. When the system can provide more intelli-
gent conversational capabilities, it would be ready for full-scale
validation on projects. It is expected that the developed QA system
for BIM IE would facilitate the development of virtual assistants in
the AECO industry, and the architecture of the developed QA sys-
tem can be extended to queries in other areas.
Data Availability Statement
All data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are
available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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