Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169

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Automation in Construction
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/autcon

Review

Applications of natural language processing in construction

Yuexiong Ding a, b, Jie Ma c, Xiaowei Luo a, b, *
a
Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
b
Architecture and Civil Engineering Research Center, Shenzhen Research Institute, City University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China
c
Department of Building and Real Estate, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In the construction industry under “Industry 4.0”, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been widely used to
Natural language processing process and analyze text data to achieve construction intelligence. However, there lacks a comprehensive review
Artificial intelligence of NLP application in construction-related areas, raising bar of research entry and setting obstacles for the rapid
Scientometric analysis
development in this fields. Ninety one NLP-related research articles in construction-related fields were retrieved
Construction research
to conduct a scientometric analysis using CiteSpace and VOSViewer, and summarized from the perspectives of
Industry 4.0
anchordatasets/data sources, technologies/tools, and applications and progress. The results show that data
isolation causing non-reproducibility of research is one of the severe problems to be solved. Besides, pure NLP
application studies will no longer meet the future industry development needs and more cross-modal interdis­
ciplinary research based on the end-to-end pre-trained neural network model framework is needed. This study
helps readers gain an in-depth understanding of the NLP application and development in construction.

1. Introduction
According to McKinsey digital globalization index, the construction
industry is currently one of the lowest digital industries globally [56]. In
the context of “Industry 4.0”, construction-related fields, including ar­
chitecture, engineering, and construction, therefore, are seizing this
opportunity to further develop in the direction of digitization and in­
telligence to achieve significant improvements in automation, produc­
tivity, and reliability. In order to implement digital strategies in
construction-related fields, AI has served as the efficient and feasible
solution to change the traditional execution mode of construction pro­
jects. In the process of digitization, data in construction-related fields
have been stored in the form of various electronic text formats, such as
Word, Sheet, Email, Extensible Markup Language (XML), Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML), Portable Document Format (PDF),
Computer-aided Design (CAD), Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), etc.,
all of which contain human language more or less. As an essential
branch of AI, NLP provides an intelligent way to process those text data,
enabling the intelligent agent to learn from human language and auto­
matically complete knowledge representation (KRep), retrieval, and
reasoning process in a human-like way. Therefore, NLP technologies
have been the key to helping achieve further intelligence in
construction-related fields.
There are more and more NLP-related studies carried out in
construction-related areas. Such as the application of NLP in document
management [13,25,90], safety management [16,24,82], compliance
checking [73,93,101], risk management [41–43], and Building Infor­
mation Modeling (BIM) [50,91,113]. However, there is no relevant re­
view research referring to NLP application in construction-related areas.
It would cause difficulties for those researchers who want to enter into a
new area since the literature review is commonly regarded as a desirable
approach to have a preliminary understanding of a research area. On the
other hand, most review studies in construction-related fields only focus
on the scientometric analysis or summary of main ideas, ignoring the
importance of sorting and summarizing datasets/data sources, tech­
nologies, and tools. For example, Martinez et al. [57] made a compre­
hensive scientometric analysis on computer vision applications in the
construction field, discussing the current research status and future
trends without summarizing data and technology. Fang et al. [26]
summarized the application of computer vision-related technology for
behavior-based safety in construction, ignoring scientometric analysis
and the review of data used in the relevant literature. Though the data
sources, algorithms, and technologies related to data mining were
reviewed by Yan et al. [94], the summary of data sources is only a simple
statistic of data acquisition methods without providing the links of data
sources and other related information. Romero-Silva and de Leeuw [72]

* Corresponding author at: Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
E-mail address: xiaowluo@cityu.edu.hk (X. Luo).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2022.104169
Received 23 September 2021; Received in revised form 9 January 2022; Accepted 12 February 2022
Available online 24 February 2022
0926-5805/© 2022 Published by Elsevier B.V.
Y. Ding et al. Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169

Table 1
Two types of searching keywords.
NLP-related keywords (NRK) Construction-related keywords (CRK)
NLP, Natural Language Processing, Jobsite*, Job Site*, Construction,
Semantic Analy*, Semantic Similarity, Construction Site*, Construction
Sentiment Analy*, Knowledge Manage*, Construction Project*,
Extract*, Knowledge Graph, Ontolog*, Construction Industry, Building Industry,
Entit*, Text Mining, Text Summar*, Civil Engineering.
LDA, Latent Dirichlet Allocation,
Document Translat*, Document
Manage*, Document Analy*.
conducted a review work of text mining analysis in Operations Research
and Management Science (OR/MS) subject area, which focused only on
publication analysis and future development. Without an all-around
review, readers might hard to have an overall in-depth understanding
of the research field even after reading the relevant review article.
In view of the current problems and limitations, this paper aims to
conduct a systematic and comprehensive review of NLP application in
construction-related fields from 2000 to 2020 to reveal the development
and evolution pattern and future trend and help readers have an overall
understanding of NLP in this field by providing getting started supports
for and in-depth research inspirations. Specifically, the objectives of this
study include 1) conducting literature collection and systematic scien­
tometric analysis (Section 2); 2) summarizing and reviewing the related
articles comprehensively from the aspects of datasets/data sources,
technologies/tools, and application & progress (Section 3); 3) discussing
the current challenges, possible solutions, and future research trends of
NLP application in construction-related fields (Section 4).
2. Publications analysis
2.1. Data collection
Two famous literature retrieval platforms, Scopus and WOS, were
adopted in this study. There are two types of keywords used for
retrieving, NLP-related keywords (NRK) and construction-related key­
words (CRK), as shown in Table 1. In the early stages, the concept of NLP
had not been widely used. Instead, “text mining” or “text processing”
was primarily used. Thus, it is difficult to find some earlier related pa­
pers only using the keyword “NLP”. However, with the development of
NLP in recent years, many text processing technologies are now in the
category of NLP. In view of the situation, the authors extended the
searching range by adding some keywords related to some major
application fields of NLP or text mining, such as “Semantics”, “Senti­
ment”, “Knowledge”, “Ontology”, “Text”, and “Document”. The authors
combined two types of keywords to search literature from advanced
search mode in Scopus and WOS. The search format on Scopus is TITLE-
ABS-KEY ((NRK 1 OR NRK 2 OR …) AND (CRK 1 OR CRK 2 OR …)), and
TS = ((NRK 1 OR NRK 2 OR …) AND (CRK 1 OR CRK 2 OR …)) on the
WOS. Here “TITLE-ABS-KEY” and “TS” indicate finding records con­
taining the keywords in the Abstract, Title, and/or Keywords fields of a
record. Other search restrictions were set as follows: Time
(“2000–2020”), Document Type(“Article”), Language(“English”), Subject
area(“Engineering”). The retrieving scope is relatively broad according
to the keywords and settings, with both advantages and disadvantages.
The advantage is collecting as many relevant articles as possible to avoid
omission. The disadvantage is introducing a large number of irrelevant
literature, increasing the workload of manual screening.
Fig. 1 shows the data collection process. Firstly, a total of 1689 and
1248 articles was retrieved from Scopus and WOS by using the keywords
and settings mentioned above. These two sources of data were then
merged to remove the duplicate items, leaving 1962 nonredundant pa­
pers. Finally, 91 articles with solid correlations with NLP were selected
through the fine manual screening. A traditional but rigorous approach
was used in the last phase. The authors first need to scan a paper and
then make the decision based on the following criteria: 1) Whether NLP-
related technologies were part of the research methodology; 2) Whether
the application field of the research was construction-related.
After collecting the literature, some preprocessing operations were
adopted, mainly on unifying data format and the merger operation of
keywords and authors. Since the exported data formats of Scopus and
WOS were inconsistent, which was not conducive to the subsequent
analysis work, the authors re-exported the final selected articles from
the WOS platform to obtain a unified data format. Another issue is that
different researchers have diverse writing and expression styles, result­
ing in the emergence of synonyms. For example, the keywords “NLP”
and “Natural Language Processing” represent the same concept, and the
keywords “Contract Management” and “Construction Contract Manage­
ment” are the same because these papers are all in the construction field.
Those phrases in the same meaning but with different forms of expres­
sion must be shifted into the same symbol, or they would be treated
differently during the following scientometric analysis. Similarly,
different publishers have their name formats. For instance, the authors
“Weiming Wang”, “W. Wang” and “W. M. Wang” may be the same person
and need to be transformed to a unified name. Note that when merging
authors, only when their personal information, such as Scopus ID,
ORCID, or email address, is the same can we determine that they are the
same person.
Fig. 2. Source publication distribution.

Fig. 1. Literature collection process.

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Y. Ding et al.
Fig. 3. Distribution of authors’ countries/regions.
Number of annual publicaon
28
13
11 11
5 5 4
3 4
2 1 1 1
0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 2016. These favorable factors make NLP usher in a small climax of
Fig. 4. Distribution of annual publications.
2.2. Overview
In this step, some straightforward statistics were shown to reveal the
data distribution.
The first one is source publication statistics. As shown in Fig. 2, a
total of 91 selected articles are published in 23 different journals, where
Automation in Construction published the highest percentage of articles,
followed by the Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering and Advanced
Engineering Informatics. The number of papers published by these top
three journals far exceeds that of others, accounting for 56% of all pa­
pers, reflecting their leading position in the field of computing in con­
struction. Furthermore, the number of articles published by Automation
in Construction is nearly twice that of the second place, which shows its
dominance in this area. Journal of Construction Engineering and Man­
agement, Journal of Management in Engineering, and Engineering Con­
struction and Architectural Management are the middle-ranking journals
according to Fig. 2, with related articles accounting for 3% to 10%. The
remaining 17 journals account for less than 3% of the articles.
Next is statistics of authors’ countries/regions. According to the
statistical results, a total of 18 countries/regions were identified. In
Fig. 3, only countries/regions with a proportion of no less than 3% are
shown. Since each article has multiple authors from different countries/
regions, the sum of the statistical values of each column is greater than
the total number of articles (91). Besides, the percentage ratio here is the
statistical value of each column divided by the total number of articles,
not the total number of authors. Hence, the sum of the total percentages
is greater than 100%. From the columnar distribution chart, these
countries/regions can be roughly divided into three echelons. The first
tier includes the USA and China, both of which account for more than
12%. The percentages of these two countries are far ahead of others,
undoubtedly benefiting from their excellent domestic environmental
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Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169
support. The USA and China are the top two big construction countries
globally [71]. On the other hand, it also indicates to a large extent that
they are pioneers and leaders in this area and have considerable inter­
national academic influence and good cooperation ability. The second
tier includes Australia, Great Britain, South Korea, Canada, and France,
accounting for 3% to 12%. These countries are also important research
forces in the field. The third-tier countries/regions account for less than
3%, which are not displayed here.
Another essential statistic is publication year, ranging from 2000 to
2020, as shown in Fig. 4. According to the broken line distribution, the
development of NLP in the construction field can be divided into three
stages. The first stage is the germination stage (2000− 2011), the second
stage is the gradual development stage (2012–2018), and the third stage
is the rapid development stage (2019–2020). After consulting the rele­
vant literature, it is found that the development pattern revealed in
Fig. 4 is related to the historical development of NLP in the general
environment. Before 2011, NLP technology was mainly based on some
machine learning models [10,40,63] or simple feed-forward neural
networks [9], coupled with the expensive computing power, resulting in
the low research popularity of NLP in various fields, let alone the con­
struction field. In 2012, Alexnet started the prelude of deep learning
[39]. After that, the neural network has gradually become the leading
technology of NLP, such as word embedding neural network in 2013
[61,62], sequence to sequence model in 2014 [78], and attention
mechanism in 2015 [6], which made the performance of NLP continu­
ously be improved. In addition, the computing power of GPU was
constantly improving, and various deep learning frameworks were
continuously open source, such as TensorFlow in 2015 and PyTorch in
development in many areas, including the construction area. During this
period, the main models of NLP were memory-based networks and their
variants, such as Long Short-term Memory networks (LSTMs) and Gated
Recurrent Unit networks (GRUs). However, from 2017, the memory-
based networks seemed to encounter a bottleneck, with no significant
breakthrough in performance. As a result, the research enthusiasm of
NLP gradually declined. It was not until Google’s new model called
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) [22]
came out that this dilemma was broken. As soon as BERT was proposed,
it achieved state-of-the-art performance in many downstream tasks of
NLP, making the pre-trained language model become the mainstream
model in this period and setting off another upsurge of NLP research.
From the bottleneck to the breakthrough, it seems to explain why the
number of articles in Fig. 4 drops sharply in 2018 and then rises
dramatically in the next two years.
2.3. Keyword co-occurrence
In this part, two analysis tools, VOSviewer and CiteSpace, were
adopted to carry out analysis work. VOSviewer was used to draw and
display the co-occurrence network due to its friendly visualization [87].
Citespace was used for computing tasks (e.g., bursts, centrality) because
of its powerful numerical calculation functions [15]. The same tools will
also be used in Sections 2.4 and 2.5.
There are 198 keywords (given by the authors) in total, and 47
appear more than two times. Fig. 5 shows the keyword co-occurrence
network. Each node represents a keyword, the node’s size indicates
the frequency of keyword occurrence, the connection between nodes
denotes the co-occurrence, and the color distinguishes keywords’ clus­
ters. There is no doubt that NLP and text mining are the two most
frequent keywords, echoing Section 2.1 that there are many cross con­
cepts and technologies between NLP and text mining. According to the
node color, six different clusters are identified. If only focus on the
keywords in the domain of construction and ignore the keywords that
represent the technologies, then the application of NLP in the con­
struction field can be divided into the following sub-domains: cluster
“Red” is related to accident analysis, cluster “Navy” is related to
Y. Ding et al. Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169

Fig. 5. Keywords co-occurrence network.

Fig. 6. Top-10 keywords with the strongest bursts.

document/information management and retrieval, cluster “Yellow” is
related to automatic compliance checking, cluster “Green” is related to
safety management, cluster “Orange” is related to building information
modeling, cluster “Azure” is related to risk management, and cluster
“Purple” is related to project management.
Fig. 6 shows the top 10 keywords with the strongest bursts and their
outburst time slots, in which “Strength” means the intensity of bursts,
“Begin” and “End” denote the start and end years of the bursts. The
greater the strength of the burst indicates that the more attention it has
received. Therefore, keyword outburst analysis can clearly show the
research focus in different periods and be regarded as an indicator of the
research hotrods. For example, the outburst period of “semantic anal­
ysis” with the highest outbreak intensity is from 2015 to 2017, indi­
cating a lot of studies focused on the application of “semantic analysis”
in the field of construction in this time interval. In terms of strength, the
top three keywords are “semantic analysis”, “automated compliance
checking”, and “ontology”. From the perspective of different outbreak
periods, the early popular keywords are “ontology”, “retrieval”, and

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Y. Ding et al. Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169

Fig. 7. Author collaboration network (ignored some small disconnected networks).

“information management”. Limited by the development of hardware

Table 2
and software technology, the researches in this period mainly focused on
Betweenness centrality of top-5 authors.
knowledge management (including extraction and retrieval). The burst
duration of these three topics is relatively long, indicating that the Author Centrality
research directions were limited to these three topics, which might also Heng LI 0.03
be due to the limitation of the technology. On the other hand, contin­ Boto ZHONG 0.02
uous and long-term research might help full exploration. In the medium Hanbin LUO 0.01
Hongqin FAN 0.01
term, “sentiment analysis”, “automatic compliance checking”, Weili FANG 0.01
“reasoning”, and “risk management” are the hot direction. Notably, the
popularity of “ontology” and “retrieval” continues to the middle stage.
The technologies in the middle period were relatively mature, allowing 2.4. Co-authorship
researchers to study in more directions, such as simulating human be­
ings for reasoning and various inspection work, resulting in more types One of the leading scientific research achievements is academic
of burst keywords after 2015. However, the burst durations after 2015 literature, and most of them were the joint efforts of different scholars or
are shorter, which means that those directions did not be studied for a diverse research groups. Studying the co-authorship of these articles
long period. Thus, a concern is that the research significance of the ar­ might help reveal the characteristics of academic exchanges and
ticles after 2015 might be more and more focused on the application of collaboration, as well as the law of discipline development in related
new technologies or the development of new directions/domains, fields.
leading to many new but shallow studies that were difficult to apply in Fig. 7 is the central part of the co-authorship network. In order to
practice. In the recent stage, more attention is paid to “BIM”, “text display more clearly, only the top-3 sub-networks with the most nodes
mining”, and “ web crawler”. There might be two hot issues in this are shown. Each node represents an author, and the connection between
period according to these outburst keywords. One is how to manage a nodes indicates their cooperation. The more links the node has, the
large amount of BIM data efficiently with the gradual prevailing of BIM. larger the node. Table 2 shows the top-5 nodes with the largest
On the other hand, it seems that the volume of data has become the main betweenness centrality (calculated in CiteSpace). Centrality is a crucial
bottleneck in the development of this field. Thus, the convenient and fast index to measure the importance of nodes in the whole network. Ac­
web crawler has become the first choice for many studies to supplement cording to the network and the centrality results, as the top-2 authors
their research data. with the highest centrality, the collaboration network of Heng LI and
Botao ZHONG forms the largest sub-network, which reveals the critical

5
Y. Ding et al.
Fig. 8. Co-citation network.
position of these two authors that play an indispensable role in pro­
moting cooperation in this field. In addition, the top-5 authors with the
highest centrality are all in the same network, indicating they and the
collaboration network formed by their research teams are the significant
research force and contribution force in this field. The key nodes of the
other two sub-networks are Geoffrey SHEN and Liyaning TANG,
respectively. Generally, close and extensive collaboration often occurs in
the research of novel things or directions because it requires multilateral
resources both in knowledge and technology to better handle the great
research challenges. Therefore, to some extent, the key authors and their
cooperation outputs in these collaboration sub-networks could be used
as the reference wind vane for research in this field.
2.5. Co-citation
The co-citation network can reveal the structure and characteristics
of the cited literature in the whole period so as to find out the core
research in the field. After calculation, the total number of citations of
Fig. 9. Top-10 references with the strongest citation bursts.
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Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169
the selected articles is 3446, of which 38 articles were cited no less than
five times, as shown in Fig. 8. In the co-citation network, each node
represents an article. The node size denotes the number of times cited by
the selected article, and the link between two nodes indicates that the
same article has cited them. Different colors in the graph represent
different clusters. As can be seen obviously from Fig. 8, Caldas’s articles
about document classification in 2003 and 2002 are the most cited
references [13,14], followed by Tixier’s article related to construction
safety accidents and risk analysis published in 2016 [83] and Eastman’s
article on compliance checking published in 2009 [23]. The relevant
research topics of these four most-cited references correspond with the
related topics of the identified clusters in keyword analysis, which
further reveals the critical enlightening role they played and the solid
research foundation they laid in this field.
The co-citation network reveals the core research of the whole
period, while citation burst analysis can reflect the fundamental re­
searches on which were significantly relied in different periods. Fig. 9
shows the top-10 articles with the most vigorous burst. According to the
Y. Ding et al. Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169

Table 3 Table 4
Statistical distribution results of articles in different construction domains and Articles with unclear data sources.
their sub-categories. Construction domains Related articles Count
Construction Secondary Related articles Count Total
DM/IM/KM [14,51,46,19,86,25,3,2,67,55,77,30,105,85] 14
domains categories
AA/SM [95,82,106,58,108,7,27,8] 8
[46], [51], [19], [5], [48], ACC [73,68,74,44,109] 5
KE/KRep/
[97], [60], [25], [70], [45], 14 BIM [50,59,91,20] 4
KRet
[67], [75], [77], [85] RM [76] 1
DM/IM/KM [14], [13], [86], [4], [3], 28 Others [52,11,64,49] 4
C/C [2], [55], [65], [33], [30], 12 Total 36
[90], [1]
Q&A Sys [38], [105] 2
[17], [83], [84], [82], [28], into six construction domains. They are Document/Information/
C/C [99], [98], [16], [107], 13 Knowledge Management (DM/IM/KM), Accident Analysis/Safety Man­
[108], [7], [27], [8]
AA/SM 22 agement (AA/SM), Automated Compliance Checking (ACC), Building
KE/KRep/ [24], [95], [96], [115],
KRet [37], [106], [58]
7 Information Modeling (BIM), Risk Management (RM), and Other
FA [66], [36] 2 Construction-related Domains (Others). In order to better and structur­
KE/KRep/ [68], [102], [103], [101],
7 ally analyze the selected articles, these six primary categories are further
KRet [110], [93], [109] divided into secondary categories. As shown in Table 3, the secondary
ACC 13
C/C [74], [111,112] 3
Checking [73], [44], [100] 3
categories of the first five primary categories are divided by types of
KE/KRep/ research objectives, including Knowledge Extraction/Retrieval (KE/
[50], [53], [59], [91], [20] 5
BIM KRet 8 KRet), Classification/Clustering (C/C), Question Answering System
C/C [35], [18], [113] 3 (Q&A Sys), Factor Analysis (FA), and Checking. However, the last pri­
KE/KRep/
[76], [43], [41] 3 mary category is still divided by the research domains of construction, i.
RM KRet 5
C/C [42], [32] 2 e., Social Media Analysis (SMA), Scene Understanding (SU), Mainte­
[34], [81], [69], [88], [80], nance Requests Analysis (MRA), Cost Management (CM), Social Re­
SMA 8
[92], [114], [47] sponsibility Analysis (SRA), and Worker Competencies Analysis (WCA).
SU [54], [49] 2 Readers should note that the taxonomy and its corresponding results
Others MRA [11], [64] 2 15
CM [89] 1
in Table 3 are not unique because some articles may belong to multiple
SRA [52] 1 construction domains. Thus, an article is forced to belong to one con­
WCA [104] 1 struction domain and one secondary category to facilitate analysis. The
Total 91 priority of article classification is: “AA/SM > ACC > BIM > RM > DM/
IM/KM”. The “DM/IM/KM” has the lowest priority because almost all
stored text data in digital fromat is also called “electronic document”,
strength of the outburst, it can be roughly divided into three intensity
which means “DM/IM/KM” has the largest scope and partially contains
levels: greater than three, greater than two but not greater than three,
other domains. For example, Chi et al. [17] classified the accident
and not greater than two. The articles with the highest outburst intensity
documents into different accident categories to better manage and store
level are the articles on compliance checking published by Tan in 2010
the accident documents. This article belongs to both“DM/IM/KM” and
[79] and the articles on document classification published by Caldas in
“AA/SM”, but finally was assigned into “AA/SM” according to the
2003 [13]. From the perspective of emergence time, it can be roughly
priority.
divided into three stages: early-stage (before 2011), middle-stage
(2011–2016), and recent-stage (2017–2020). Notably, there were no
burst articles in the early stage because this area was just in the 3.1. Datasets and sources
exploratory phase, with low research popularity and less related re­
searches, which was also mentioned in the publication time analysis in In this section, the datasets and data sources used in the selected
Section 2.2. The early basic research laid a solid foundation for the papers will be arranged methodically. After statistics, there are many
development of this area, which can also illustrate why seven of the top- articles with unclear data sources, up to 36 (39.6%), as shown in Table 4,
10 references with the strongest burst were published before 2011. After including those papers without a relevant introduction to the dataset
2010, this field gradually saw a research boom. Similarly, those re­ and those with a simple introduction but without source links. For
searches in the middle stage would continue to pave the way for the example, Caldas et al. [14] did not describe their data. Al Qady and
following research period. For example, the burst references in the Kandil [3] only said that their data was collected from an international
recent period, Fan’s article related to accidents analysis and safety airport construction project but no more specific information. Table 5
management [24] and Zhang’s article on document information shows a total of 33 data types and 41 datasets adopted by selected ar­
extraction and compliance checking [102,103], were published in the ticles, where each dataset might be adopted by multiple articles, and
middle stage. Since there is a specific correlation between the original each source might be used by multiple datasets. Among those datasets,
papers and references, if an article had frequently been cited at a certain seven with a data volume of less than a hundred (17.1%), fourteen with
period, the research focus or topics might be relevant to that article. more than a hundred but less than a thousand (34.1%), fifteen with more
Therefore, it can be boldly speculated that some of the current research than a thousand but less than ten thousand (36.6%), and five with more
trends in this field are accident analysis, safety management, and than ten thousand (12.2%). The size of most datasets is not very large.
compliance checking. The authors also noted that few articles in Table 5 shared the data
they collected, preprocessed, or labeled, which means that much of the
3. NLP in construction-related areas time needs to be taken in data collection, preprocessing, and labeling if
the researchers want to repeat the studies and make progress. Unfortu­
In this section, the authors will introduce NLP in construction-related nately, the newly collected data may be different from the original. Liu
areas from three aspects: datasets and sources, technologies and tools, et al. [54] is the only exception (AEC Image Caption in Table 5) who has
and applications and progresses. With a slight modification in the results shared the annotated dataset, source code, and even the trained model
of keyword clustering in Section 2.4, the selected articles are classified to enable other researchers to easily make further exploration based on
their research. Due to the limitation of data, some studies can only be

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Table 5 Table 5 (continued )

Datasets adopted by related articles. Y/P means paid access, and Y/AL denotes Data Types Source Links Public Dataset Related Articles
public but area limited. Accessible Size
Data Types Source Links Public Dataset Related Articles Construction https://www.
Accessible Size Accident Cases in westlawasia.com/
DM/IM/KM Hong Kong hong-kong
https://www.cpwr 1167 [17]
Classified Online https://sweets. constructionsolut Y
Product construction.com/ Y 3030 [13] ions.org
Descriptions default.jsp Construction https://www.cdc. 140 [83]
Web Pages in Accident Cases or gov/niosh/face/ Y 3556 [84]
https://dmoz-odp.
Human-edited Y 7500 [38] Injury Reports or inhouse.html
org
Directory Safety Risk Cases https://www.
General Conditions Y
https://www. or Accident cross-safety.org/uk
of the Contract Y/P 1 [4,5,70] 590 [115]
aiacontracts.org Narratives in the https://www.
for Construction US worksafebc.com/ Y
Engineering en
domain-Specific https://www. https://www.osha. 1000 [28,98,99,16]
Y 111 [48] N
Technical ncree.narl.org.tw gov 2000 [107]
Documents Investigation
https://pcces.arch Reports on
nowledge.com/c http://www.
Construction Y/AL 100 [66]
CAD Drawings si/Default.aspx? Y 134 [97] chinasafety.gov.cn
Accidents in
aspxerrorpath China
=/csi/Default.aspx News of
http://www. https://news.sbs.
Construction
scotland.gov.uk/ co.kr/news/ Y 28,263 [36]
Fire-Accident in
Topics/Built- newsMain.do
Korea
Environment/ https://www.
Scottish Technical
Building/Building- Y 1 [60] kosha.or.kr/kosha/ Y
Standards Korea Accident
standards/ index.do 4263 [37]
publications/ Reports
https://www.
pubtech/ N
cosmis.or.kr/
thb2011octdom
https://forums.aut Count Data Types: 5, Dataset: 10
Y
odesk.com ACC
Q & A Data related http://www.cad
Y 451 [45] [102], [103],
to CAD tutor.net International https://www.iccs
https://www. Y/P 1 [111], [112],
Y Building Code afe.org/
cadforum.cz/en [93,100,101,110]
https:// Count Data Types: 1, Dataset: 1
buildingdata.
N
energy.gov/ BIM
projects
Green Building https://standards.
https://www. 71 [75]
Cases buildingsmart.
wbdg.org/ Standards of IFC Y 1 [53]
org/IFC
additional- Y
/RELEASE/
resources/case-
https://www.
studies BIM Case Studies Y 240 [35]
bimobject.com/
http://cdaily.kr/ Y
https://www.
https://www. Y
Y dbpia.co.kr/
dnews.co.kr/
BIM-related http://riss.kr/ Y
https://www. 450 [18]
Y literatures https://kiss.
Issues of fnnews.com/
kstudy.com/index. Y
International http://www.
25,143 [65] asp
Construction kiscon.net/ Y
https://apps.
Market ksc_main.asp
User comments for autodesk.com/
http://www.molit. Y 2120 [113]
Y BIM Application RVT/en/Home/
go.kr/portal.do
Index
http://www.
Y
ohmycon.co.kr/ Count Data Types: 4, Dataset: 4
(LexisNexis)
Construction- RM
https://www.
Defect Litigation Y/P 1498 [33]
lexisnexis.com/en- Bid Documents of
Cases https://dot.ca.go
us/home.page Infrastructure Y 260 [42]
v/
https://www.uspt Projects
Patent Documents Y 348 [90]
o.gov/ International
https://www. Federation of
Publications scopus.com/ Consulting https://fidic.org/ Y/P 1 [41,43]
Related to Civil search/form.uri? Y/P 663 [1] Engineers Red
Engineering display = Book
basic#basic https://www.sec.
Transaction Data of gov/edgar/
Count Data Types: 12, Dataset: 12
Construction searchedgar/ Y 995 [32]
AA/SM Companies companysearch.
html
Y/P 360 [24]
Count Data Types: 3, Dataset: 3

(continued on next page)

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Y. Ding et al. Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169

Table 5 (continued )
Data Types Source Links Public Dataset Related Articles
Accessible Size

Others

25,289 [34]
https://weibo.
WeiBo data Y 5360 [88]
com/login.php
80,793
[80]
275,325
https://twitter.
Twitter data Y 3200 [81]
com/
23 [69]
Legislative https://www.
Document on legco.gov.hk/
Y 1748 [92]
Construction general/english/
Project library/index.html
https://www.hkpl.
News of Bursting gov.hk/tc/e-resou
Water Pipes in rces/e-databases/k Y/P 2828 [114]
Hong Kong eyword/wisenews/
all/1
News of
Prefabricated https://www.cnki.
Y/P 615 [47]
Buildings in net/
China
Competitively Bid
https://dot.ca.
Data of Highway Y 1221 [89]
gov/
Projects
https://github.
Image Caption for
com/HannahHua
Construction Y >1000 [54]
nLIU/AEC-imag
Activity Scenes
e-captioning
https://www.chi
Y
nahr.com/

https://www. Fig. 10. Relationship of NLU and NLG in the scope of NLP.
Recruitment Y/AL
zhaopin.com/
Advertisements http://www. 243,521 [104]
for Constriction job1001.com/
Y to generate natural language that humans can understand. The input
Project Manager https://www. knowledge of NLG can also be transformed from other types of data (e.
Y
liepin.com/ g., image, audio, etc.) by other encoding models (e.g., CNN, LSTM, etc.).
https:// For example, an image can be encoded into a set of vectors by a CNN
Y
www.51job.com/
model and then as the input of an NLG model (e.g., LSTM) to gradually
Count Data Types: 8 Dataset: 11 generate a series of words.
Total Data Types: 33 Dataset: 41 Fig. 11 is the Mind map of the overall NLP context generated ac­
cording to the technologies used in the selected articles, and Table 6
provides details of the tools adopted in the selected papers for readers’
carried by a few researchers with data, forming a research monopoly. reference and adoption. The main applications of NLG include machine
The most apparent research monopoly, for example, is the ACC research translation (MT), answers generation in Q&A system, and auto-summary
with “International Building Code” as the data source in Table 5, which is such as generating reports from company income data, summarizing the
almost conducted in the research team with El-Gohary as the core. main content of an image, etc. In the current stage, the major technol­
Though the International Building Code can be paid access, the regu­ ogies and models of NLG include LSTM, GRU, Seq2seq, BERT, and
lations extracted and processed by El-Gohary’s team and the evaluation Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), among which BERT and GPT
data they used are the keys. Unfortunately, those data were shared only are state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. On the other hand, according to the
within their teams. The research monopoly is very unfavorable to the review of collected articles, the appearance rate of NLG in the field of
healthy development and progress of academia. In addition, 27 of 33 construction is far lower than NLU in the field of construction (only two
types of data (84.4%) in Table 5 only have one related article, indicating articles were related to NLG, more details in Section 3.3). NLU mainly
a lack of iterative/progressive research in the same or similar research includes the following parts:
directions. It might be caused by data monopoly to a large extent.
1) Morphology Analysis (MA). MA uses the computer to analyze the
morphology of natural language to judge the structure and category
3.2. Technologies and tools of words, which usually has the following operations:
a) Tokenization/Segmentation. Tokenization is the process of
This section aims to provide the reader an overall context of NLP separating and possibly classifying various parts of the input
without details. Therefore, the authors will systematically organize but sentences. For English sentences, it can be simply divided ac­
briefly introduce the basic idea of NLP technologies/algorithms applied cording to spaces. The situation becomes complicated for words
or appeared in the selected articles. Please refer to their original sources that can not be separated by spaces (such as Chinese). The initial
for more detailed information. segmentation method was based on dictionary matching, which
The primary tasks of NLP generally can be divided into Natural was fast and low cost but had poor adaptability. Statistics-based
Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation methods were then developed, such as Hidden Markov Model
(NLG). The relationships between NLP, NLU, and NLG are shown in (HMM), Conditional Random Field (CRF). The latest methods are
Fig. 10. NLU structurally represents/encodes the unstructured text to deep learning-based, such as the Bi-LSTM-CRF proposed by
make machines understand human language like humans, while NLG Huang et al. [31].
transforms/decodes the structured data into the text to allow machines

9
Y. Ding et al.
Fig. 11. Mind map of the overall NLP context, including technologies, algorithms, and tools.
b) Word Normalization (for some languages, e.g., English) includes
Stemming and Lemmatization. Stemming is the process of
reducing inflected words (sometimes derivatives) to stem, word
base, or root form. For example, “does”, “done”, “doing”, and
“did” will be restored to “do” through Stemming. Lemmatization
is the process of transforming the complex form of words into the
most basic form. For example, “cities”, “children”, and “teeth”
will be transformed into the basic forms of “city”, “child”, “tooth”,
respectively. Word normalization is generally a lexicon-based
method implemented by simple dictionary lookup.
c) Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging. POS tagging is the task of giving
each word in a sentence a POS category. The POS categories here
may be Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Prepositions, Conjunctions, etc.
d) Named Entity Recognition (NER). NER is the task of locating and
identifying entities mentioned in unstructured text into pre­
defined categories such as person names, organizations, loca­
tions, medical codes, time expressions, quantities, monetary
values, percentages, etc.
2) Syntactic Parsing (SP). SP is the process of analyzing the input sen­
tence to obtain the syntactic structure, mainly including Phrase
Structure Parsing (PSP), Dependency Syntactic Parsing (DSP). PSP is
used to identify the phrase structure in the sentence and the hier­
archical syntactic relationship between phrases, such as Noun Phrase
(NP), Verb Phrase (VP). DSP is utilized to recognize the grammatical
interdependency between words in sentences, such as the de­
pendency among subject, predicate, and object.
3) Semantic Analysis (SA). For different text units, the tasks of SA are
different. At the word level, the basic task of SA is Word Sense
Disambiguation (WSD), which refers to identifying the correct
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Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169
meaning of an ambiguous word in a specific context. For example,
the word “table” has different meanings in the sentence “There is a
table in the room” and “This is the metric conversion table”. At the
sentence level is the Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) that assigns labels
to words or phrases in senses to indicate their semantic roles. Take
the sentence “Who did what to whom at where” for an example, no
matter how the sentence structure changes, “who” is always the
agent, “did” is the predicate, “what” is the theme, “whom” is the
recipient, and “where” is the location. At the textual level is the task
of finding all expressions that refer to the same entity, called Cor­
eference Resolution (CR). For example, the word “It” refers to the
“window” when the text is “There is a window. It is open.”.
4) Text Representation (TextRep). TR aims to numerically represent the
unstructured text/documents to make them mathematically
computable. The NLU implementations of the above tasks are the
simulated methods according to human understanding, while the
TextRep is a numerical task that can be regarded as a computer’s
specific way for NLU. Generally, TextRep can be implemented in the
following ways:
a) Boolean Model (BooMo). BM generates a vector consisting of
0 and 1 to indicate whether the specific word appears in the text.
BooMo is a strict matching model only using logical operators
“and”, “or” and “not” for vector calculation.
b) Vector Space Model (VSM). VSM utilizes a real-valued vector to
represent the words, sentences, or documents, which implicitly
projects the knowledge contained in the text into a specific vector
space. BooMo can be regarded as a particular case of the VSM, but
the primary methods are the following.
Y. Ding et al. Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169

Table 6
Tools/lexicons that were used by the selected papers. Multi NLP denotes that the tool can perform multiple NLP operations. TA/DM/ML denotes that the tool is an
integrated platform that supports text analysis, data mining, and machine learning. Multi-Lan means multiple languages.
Tool name Tool types Functions Language Open- Source/URL
source?

Jieba Python package Tokenization Chinese Y https://pypi.org/project/jieba/

PKUSeg Python package Tokenization Chinese Y https://pypi.org/project/pkuseg/
Chinese,
PanGu Software Tokenization Y http://pangusegment.codeplex.com/
English
Stanford Tagger Java package POS Multi-Lan Y https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/tagger.shtml
Stanford Parser Java package SP Multi-Lan Y https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml
https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/f2f25096d3dc6561a855dab9
SyntaxNet Python package SP Multi-Lan Y
14cf2913100728d6/research/syntaxnet
Word2Vec Python package WordEmb Multi-Lan Y https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/text/word2vec
FastText Python package WordEmb Multi-Lan Y https://fasttext.cc/
Genism Python package TopMo Multi-Lan Y https://pypi.org/project/gensim/
MALLET Java package TopMo Multi-Lan Y http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/topics.php
BERT Python package Multi NLP Multi-Lan Y https://github.com/google-research/bert
GPT Python package Multi NLP Multi-Lan Y https://github.com/openai/gpt-3
NLTK Python package Multi NLP Multi-Lan Y https://www.nltk.org/
HanLP Web API Multi NLP Multi-Lan Y https://github.com/hankcs/HanLP
CoreNLP Java package Multi NLP Multi-Lan Y https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/
GATE Software Multi NLP Multi-Lan Y https://gate.ac.uk/
Sundance Software Multi NLP English N https://www.cs.utah.edu/~riloff/pdfs/official-sundance-tr.pdf
PolyAnalyst Software TA/DM/ML Multi-Lan N https://www.megaputer.com/polyanalyst/
KNIME Software TA/DM/ML English Y https://www.knime.com/
Voyant-tool Web Application TA/DM/ML Multi-Lan Y https://voyant-tools.org/
English,
RapidMiner Software TA/DM/ML N https://rapidminer.com/
Japanese
IBM SPSS
Software TA/DM/ML Multi-Lan N https://www.ibm.com/products/spss-modeler
Modeller
Leximancer Software TA/DM/ML Multi-Lan N https://www.leximancer.com/
Ontology
Protégé Software English Y https://protege.stanford.edu/
editor
Public ontology
SUMO Word mapping Multi-Lan Y http://www.ontologyportal.org/
lexicon
Material ontology
MatWeb Word mapping English Y http://www.matweb.com/search/SearchSubcat.asp
lexicon
WordNet Lexicon Word mapping English Y https://wordnet.princeton.edu/
HowNet Semantic lexicon Word mapping Chinese Y https://github.com/thunlp/OpenHowNet
CKIP Corpus / Chinese Y https://ckip.iis.sinica.edu.tw/

i. Bag-of-Words (BOW). In the BOW, the text is represented as a
bag (multiple sets) of words. The frequency of each word in
the text is counted to obtain the vector representation of the
text. However, the position information of words in sentences
can not be preserved, and there will be high dimensionality
and sparsity when the corpus increases.
ii. Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF).
Intuitively, the importance of a word increases with the
number of times it appears in the document but decreases
inversely with the frequency it appears in the corpus. Based
on this idea, TF-IDF considers not only the term frequency in
the document but also the total term frequency in the whole
corpus. The more a word appears in a document and the less it
appears in all documents, the higher the TF-IDF value of the
word, and the more it can represent the article. Normalized
TF-IDF is often called TFC-weighting, which considers the
third factor: the document vector’s length. TF-IDF can be used
for feature selection (by setting a threshold value of TF-IDF)
and keyword extraction. However, it still can not retain the
positional relationship of words in sentences.
iii. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), sometimes called Latent Se­
mantic Indexing (LSI). LSA can solve the problems of high
dimension and sparsity. LSA decomposes the document-term
matrix obtained by TF-IDF into the product of two smaller
matrices through Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to
remove the “noise” in the document, such as stop-words,
misuse words, or occasionally irrelevant words. After matrix
decomposition, the semantic structure of the text is gradually
present. Compared with the traditional vector space, the
dimension of latent semantic space and the semantic rela­
tionship becomes smaller and clearer. In addition to dimen­
sionality reduction, LSA can also be used for document Topic
Modeling (TopMo).
iv. Word Embedding (WordEmb). WordEmb uses a large number
of text data to train a representation model that can generate
dense low-dimensional vectors. The closer the meaning of two
words, the closer the distance between two word-vectors in
the vector space. The initial WordEmb is a static representa­
tion method that can not solve polysemy, such as Word2Vec
and FastText. The latest and SOTA WordEmb model is a dy­
namic representation method based on context embedding,
whose output representation can change according to the
context, such as the Embeddings from Language Model
(ELMo), BERT, and GPT models.
c) N-Gram. N-Gram is a statistical language model used to calculate
the next most likely word for the given text. It is based on the
Markov hypothesis assuming the occurrence of the Nth word is
only relevant to the first N-1 words but not related to other words,
then the occurrence probability of the whole sentence is equal to
the probability product of the occurrence of each word. N-Gram
divides the text with a sliding window of size N to form a fragment
sequence with fragment length N. When N = 1, it is called
Unigram, N = 2 is called Bigram, and N = 3 is called Trigram.
Take the sentence “He is wearing gloves” and N = 3 for an example,
the fragment sequence will be [“He”, “He is”, “He is wearing”, “is
wearing gloves”, “wearing gloves”, “gloves”].
d) Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). LDA is a Bayesian-based
generative statistical model that allows sets of observations to

11
Y. Ding et al.
be explained by unobserved groups. The LDA assumes each
document is a mixture of a small number of topics, and each
word’s presence is attributed to one of the document’s topics. In
this case, the topic of each document is given in the form of a
probability distribution. After analyzing some documents
(observed data) and extracting their topics (or probability dis­
tribution), topic clustering or text classification can be carried out
according to the topic distributions.
3.3. Applications & progress
Since there are a relatively large number of articles, this section will
briefly summarize articles according to the taxonomic results shown in
Table 3. In addition, almost all NLP studies have conducted the same
preprocessing operations on text data, including tokenization, stop­
words removal, stemming, lemmatization, POS tagging, NER, phase
chunking, etc. The authors also confirm this after reading through each
article. Therefore, the preprocessing operations for data will not be
mentioned in the summary of the articles.
3.3.1. Document/information/knowledge management
3.3.1.1. Knowledge extraction/retrieval. In knowledge extraction,
Choudhary et al. [19] used commercial software (PolyAnalyst 5.0) to
systematically analyze PPR files and mined valuable experience and
knowledge to facilitate dissemination and exploitation of PPR learning.
Al Qady and Kandil [5] adopted a natural language parsing tool (Sun­
dance) to parse contract documents into noun phrases (NP), verb
phrases (VP), prepositional phrases (PP), etc. By identifying the subject
and object associated with VP, an SVO triplet concept < subj, VP, obj >
was identified with the F1 score reaching 90% of human performance.
McGibbney and Kumar [60] developed a user-oriented legislation
browser with viewing, retrieval, and navigation functions by automat­
ically adding corresponding notes to the named entities and specific
terms detected by the tool GATE. Niu and Issa [70] also utilized GATE to
extract the common root concepts/ontologies to help build a taxonomy
for the domain ontology of construction contracts. Knowledge visuali­
zation is an essential part of knowledge extraction, which is conducive to
knowledge absorption. The common forms of knowledge visualization
are tree, graph, and word cloud. For example, with integrating multiple
methods (CRF, Fuzzy Neural Networks, LDA, Family-tree), Li et al. [45]
modeled the long-term knowledge evolution of empirical engineering
knowledge in the development of CAD. Nedeljkovic and Kovacevic [67]
proposed a two-phase method to extract key phrases from project doc­
uments, and then built a phrase graph network to visualize valuable
project knowledge according to the relationship calculated by the se­
mantic similarity between phrases. Sun et al. [77] extracted keywords
from monthly construction reports by TF-IDF and visualized the key­
words by co-occurrence network and word cloud technologies to reveal
the hidden knowledge.
Another topic is knowledge retrieval, which is usually achieved by
comparing the similarity of two represented vectors. Li and Ramani [46]
developed an ontology-based design document query system using TF-
IDF and cosine similarity and achieved better performance than
keyword-based search technology. Lin and Soibelman [51] used various
query expansion strategies combined with the extended Boolean model
to assist online product information retrieval in AEC areas. Many
improvement studies have been conducted to improve the performance
of traditional retrieval models. For example, considering full-text-based
retrieval might reduce the relevance ranking due to the multi-topic
attribute of documents, Lin et al. [48], therefore, combined ontology
concepts with paragraphs to form ontopassages to realize a paragraph-
level retrieval system for engineering domain-specific technical docu­
ments. By using external knowledge, Yu and Hsu [97] developed a
corpus-based approach based on Bayesian classifiers to reduce the
12
Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169
dimension of VSM and improve the efficiency of CAD document
retrieval. Fan et al. [25] improved the retrieval performance of project
information in AEC documents by considering more features, including
the project-specific terms in the documents and their dependency re­
lations. In addition to adding extra features, Shen et al. [75] also used
different methods for different features to measure the local similarity
because a single similarity measurement might be one-sided. The global
similarity was then obtained by weighted addition. Similarly, combined
with several similarity measures, Torkanfar and Azar [85] proposed a
method to quantify the similarity of construction projects based on se­
mantic and structural metrics derived from their Work Breakdown
Structures (WBSs).
3.3.1.2. Classification/clustering. The general process of document
classification is preprocessing, text representation, and classification
modeling. Caldas et al. [14] developed the construction document
classification model using different text representation methods, such as
Boolean Weighting, Absolute Frequency, TF-IDF, and TFC-weighting.
The TFC-weighting combined with Support Vector Machine (SVM)
finally achieved the best results. Based on the same combination, Caldas
and Soibelman [13] implemented an automated hierarchical document
classification system with an average classification accuracy of three
levels was 92.05%. To refine the represented knowledge, Ur-Rahman
and Harding [86] developed a three-step classification system for post-
project reviews (PPR) document classification. However, the system’s
performance was a little bit low and had much room for improvement.
After Caldas, Al Qady and Kandil [4] implemented the automated hi­
erarchical classification by document clustering using LSA, which was
also adopted by the research of ([2,3] for document clustering and
classification. Document tagging is a multilabel classification task. For
example, Mahfouz et al. [55] developed a classification model based on
TF-IDF and Naive Bayes (NB) to automatically tag legal factors for the
different site conditions (DSC) litigations. Moon et al. [65] developed a
tagging system for global contracts that automatically assigned five tags
to each document. The tags of these two studies were generated by
human experience. Unlike them, Jallan et al. [33] and Afolabi et al. [1]
adopted LDA to automatically assign each document one or more topics
to realize document tagging. The other latest researches like Hassan and
Le [30] classified the contractual text into requirements and non­
requirements text with Word2Vec and SVM, achieving better perfor­
mance than other machine learning methods. Wu et al. [90] vectorized
the construction patent documents in combination with N-Gram and TF-
IDF. The Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) model is then used to identify the
patent type of information and communication technology.
3.3.1.3. Question answering system. The question answering system is a
next-step application of knowledge retrieval, which further generates
the answer from relevant documents or paragraphs that has been
retrieved or located. For example, Kovacevic et al. [38] developed a
system to generate the answers to construction-related questions ac­
cording to the identified key elements from the retrieved paragraphs of
web pages processed by semi-supervised SVM and TF-IDF. However,
answer generation according to the key elements was a rule-based
method. To achieve full automation, Zhong et al. [105] implemented
an NLG model based on the BERT model to automatically generate an­
swers from the retrieved relevant paragraphs.
3.3.2. Accident analysis/safety management
3.3.2.1. Knowledge extraction/retrieval. With the help of POS tagging,
Yeung et al. [95] simplified and reorganized the complex safety accident
narrative text to generate a narrative map, which was widely believed to
help learners better understand and remember the key factors and
events leading to the accidents. Yeung et al. [96] further developed a
computational narrative semi-fiction generation model to generate new
Y. Ding et al.
narratives from the existing narrative knowledge base to support
training and learning. Tixier et al. [83] developed a set of NLP programs
based on manual rules to automatically extract attributes and outcomes
from the injury reports with an F1 score of 96%. Martínez-Rojas et al.
[58] used an NLP software (KNIME) to extract seven types of content
from safety and health plans documents using manually defined rules to
check the important specific requirements of the plans at an early stage.
There were also some improvement strategies for retrieval tasks in the
AA/SM domain. For example, Fan and Li [24] reduced the dimension of
TF-IDF vector dimension using LSI and completed the retrieval task of
similar accident cases with the cosine similarity. However, the human
force was added for the selection of terms. In addition to using TF-IDF
for document representation, Zou et al. [115] also applied Word2Vec
to vectorize and expand query text to improve the performance of case
retrieval. Kim and Chi [37] used Word2Vec for query text expansion and
CRF for latent knowledge extraction of documents to achieve a better
retrieval performance of accident cases. A simple cross-modal retrieval
case in the AA/SM domain was carried out by Zhong et al. [106]. The
research first applied the HowNet to extract the ontologies related to
potential hazards in project documents as the core concepts and then
manually labeled the potential hazard categories of construction images
based on the extracted ontologies. Finally, similar images were retrieved
by calculating the similarity between the query text vector and the
annotation text vector of the image.
3.3.2.2. Classification/clustering. The classification task in AA/SM is
usually to classify the categories of accident reports. For example, Chi
et al. [17] combined TF-IDF, principal component analysis (PCA), and
SVM to classify the accident category of the document. Goh and Ubey­
narayana [28] also used SVM to classify construction accident narrative
documents, while Zhang et al. [99] integrated multiple machine
learning models to improve the classification performance. Based on the
knowledge extracted by Follow-up Tixier et al. [83], a series of follow-up
studies were carried out. For example, Tixier et al. [84] predicted the
construction injury types according to the extracted attributes and
outcomes. Tixier et al. [82] constructed an undirected graph using the
extracted key attributes from the injury reports and then applied several
graph clustering algorithms to dig out possible safety clashes. Baker
et al. [8] took the extracted attributes as features to classify the cate­
gories of safety outcomes by using different Machine Learning (ML)
models. Entering the era of deep learning, Word2Vec was commonly
used instead of TF-IDF. Word2vec is often used in conjunction with other
deep learning models, such as LSTM [98], GRU [7,16], and Convolu­
tional Neural Network (CNN) [107,108]. The studies of Goh and
Ubeynarayana [28], Zhang et al. [99], Zhang [98], and Cheng et al. [16]
were based on the same dataset, which with the F1 scores of 0.67, 0.68,
0.723, and 0.69, respectively. A gradual upward trend indicates that the
performance of the deep learning model is higher than the machine
learning model. However, Word2Vec is a static method that can not
solve the problem of polysemy. Therefore, the dynamic representation
method started to be used. For instance, Fang et al. [27] used the BERT
model to represent the documents and achieved a classification accuracy
of 86.91%.
3.3.2.3. Factor analysis. Na et al. [66] extracted 43 safety risk factors
from the investigation reports on construction accidents and analyzed
the relationships of each safety risk factor through interpretative
structural modeling (ISM). Through several morphological analyses,
Kim and Kim [36] identified the construction fire accident factors from
news articles and then analyzed the main factors causing fire accidents
in different seasons via PCA.
3.3.3. Automated compliance checking
3.3.3.1. Knowledge extraction/representation/retrieval. The earliest
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Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169
paper related to ACC in the construction field began in 2013 Salama and
El-Gohary [73], which proposed a deontic model based on syntactic and
semantic features consisting of a hierarchy of normative concepts,
interconcept relations, and deontic axioms (for regulations represent­
ing). The study preliminarily explored the feasibility of ACC. ACC first
requires understanding and extracting constraints from various con­
struction regulatory documents and then transforming them into a
formalized format that enables checking/reasoning. For example, Nie­
meijer et al. [68] parsed the design constraints described in natural
language into tree structure according to predefined rules using syn­
tactic parsing to realize the standardized representation of constraints.
After POS tagging and dependency parse, J. Zhang and El-Gohary [102]
adopted pattern-matching-based rules and conflict resolution rules to
extract regulations and then represented them using the deontic logic
method Salama and El-Gohary [73], while Jiansong Zhang and El-
Gohary [103] proposed a bottom-up transformation method based on
semantic mapping rules and conflict resolution rules to extract con­
straints and transform them into first-order logic (FOL) with Prolog
syntax. After extracting regulatory concepts and IFC concepts from
compliance documents using pattern-matching-based rules, Zhang and
El-Gohary [101] then identified the relationship between each pair of
regulatory concepts and IFC concepts to develop an IFC extension mode
combining compliance-related information. Li et al. [44] utilized POS
tagging, Gazetteer Lookup, and chunking to extract spatial constraints
from spatial configurations.
Many strategies have also been applied to improve the performance
of regulation extraction. For example, Zhou and El-Gohary [110]
introduced ontology knowledge to help recognize the semantic features
of the text better, improving the rule-based extraction performance.
Since almost all rule-based extraction methods were using POS tagging,
the extraction accuracy largely depends on the accuracy of POS tagging.
Therefore, Xue and Zhang [93] proposed error-driven transformational
rules to improve the existing taggers, which reduced 82.7% of errors in
POS tagging results of building codes. On the other hand, rule-based
extraction is limited and usually relies on predefined vocabularies
involving heavy feature engineering. In order to solve this problem,
Zhong et al. [109] proposed a two-steps deep neural network, which first
combined the Bi-LSTM and the CRF to extract the entities, then fore­
casted the constraint patterns between those entities by the combination
of LSTM and MLP. Unlike rule-based extraction methods, the two-steps
deep neural network can be applied without complex handcrafted fea­
tures engineering.
3.3.3.2. Classification/clustering. The regulatory documents usually
contain other types of text. Therefore, the classification task in the ACC
domain plays a filtering role by identifying sentences or paragraphs
containing constraints to improve the efficiency and accuracy of rule
extraction. For example, Salama and El-Gohary [74] proposed a text
classification model based on SVM to classify the parts of regulatory
documents into different categories to reduce the complexity of subse­
quent constraint extraction. P. Zhou and El-Gohary [111] proposed an
ML-based approach to categorize and group regulatory documents hi­
erarchically, while Peng Zhou and El-Gohary [112] further added
ontology knowledge to the model to achieve better performance.
3.3.3.3. Checking. The checking process of ACC in the earliest related
paper was carried out manually [73]. To make it more automatic, Li
et al. [44] defined a mechanism in the geographical information system
to check compliance by executing multiple spatial rules in a logical
sequence. Based on the research of Jiansong Zhang and El-Gohary
Bahdanau et al. [102], Zhang and El-Gohary [100] systematically pro­
posed an automatic ACC system, including regulation extraction and
transformation, fact extraction and transformation, and compliance
reasoning. The regulation and fact were transformed into logic rules and
logic facts using the FOL format, and then a B-Prolog’s reasoner was
Y. Ding et al.
used to reason according to the logic rules and logic facts to complete
compliance checking.
3.3.4. Building information modeling
3.3.4.1. Knowledge extraction/retrieval. With the help of the Interna­
tional Framework for Dictionaries (IFD), Lin et al. [50] mapped the
keywords queried by users into corresponding IFC entities. The graph-
based path search method was then applied to find the relations be­
tween entities within the IFC graph model to realize intelligent fine-
grained retrieval of BIM data. Liu et al. [53] used explicit semantic
analysis technology to build an external knowledge repository specific
to the BIM product model from IFC4 release documents to enhance
product model retrieval via two-step enhancements: concept expansion
and re-ranking based on local context analysis. Marzouk and Enaba [59]
developed a dynamic text analysis model of BIM contract and corre­
spondence by extracting keywords and essential terms from construc­
tion contracts and closely monitoring them in BIM change requests.
Dawood et al. [20] also developed a design change tracking system that
automatically extracted the change type, target object, content, and
other information from the change request text. The system then
compared the changes of old and new IFC documents to judge whether
the design change request was met. After extracting keywords related to
equipment installation information from real-world facility installation
information table and conducting semantic disambiguation based on
IFD, Xie et al. [91] constructed a hierarchy tree from the BIM model for
displaying devices’ spatial information and carried out the matrix
matching operation on it to realize the matching between the real-world
facility and BIM data.
3.3.4.2. Classification/clustering. Jung and Lee [35] built an automatic
classification of BIM cases to compare the classification performance of
the unsupervised clustering method (LSA and LDA) and supervised
classification method (SVM) and finally concluded that LDA produced
the highest F1 score. Likewise, based on LDA, Choo et al. [18] conducted
the topic clustering analysis on BIM-related research literature to
explore the research and development trends of BIM. Zhou et al. [113]
trained a Bayesian classifier for sentiment classification of user com­
ments to analyze users’ attitudes of each BIM application, then used LDA
to cluster the comments of negative emotions to further identify the user
problems reflected in negative comments.
In addition to the above two categories, the application of NLP in
BIM usually involves ACC. Relevant studies such as ([68,73,100,101]
have been introduced in Subsection 3.3.3.
3.3.5. Risk management
3.3.5.1. Knowledge extraction/retrieval. Siu et al. [76] applied an NLP
software (IBM SPSS Modeller) to identify 16 New Engineering Contract
(NEC) risk categories from unstructured textual descriptions of Hong
Kong NEC projects and analyze risk rating using the decision tree. Based
on the extracted SVO tuple inspired by Al Qady and Kandil [5], Lee et al.
[43] developed a rule-based automatic contract risk extraction model
for poisonous clauses in international construction contracts, while Lee
et al. [41] proposed a proactive risk assessment model from the
perspective of the contractor to identify potential contractual risks that
may raise disputes in contract conditions modified by the owner.
3.3.5.2. Classification/clustering. Lee and Yi [42] combined the un­
structured bidding documents processed by LDA and the structured
numeric data to fit an ML-based classifier to identify the risk level of
bidding documents. Jallan and Ashuri [32] categorized the risk factors
of the sentences extracted from publicly traded 10-K documents of
construction companies using the extended Word2Vec model (FastText)
and cosine similarity.
14
Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169
3.3.6. Others
Note that there are some new directions in the “Others” category in
Table 3 that do not appear in the results of keyword clustering, such as
SMA, SU, and MRA. Especially the SMA, which has up to 8 relevant
articles. One of the possible reasons it did not be identified during
keyword clustering is that those articles in “Social Media Analysis” did
not unify representing keywords. For example, the related keywords
those articles used are “social network”, “social network analysis”,
“social factor”, “public opinion”, “public attitude”, and “news analysis”.
However, fundamentally speaking, all these analysis studies were based
on “Social Media”. Having a certain number of relevant studies but no
unified keywords may indicate a new hot research trend or direction. On
the other hand, the keyword inconsistency is not obvious in the SU and
MRA because the articles in these two domains were all published in
2020. The latest publications in new domains also might be a signal of
new research directions.
3.3.6.1. Social media analysis. Social media data are often used to
analyze public opinion, attitude, and sentiment towards certain public
events/projects. The common media platforms are Twitter and Weibo.
For example, Jiang et al. [34] crawled public messages and detailed
information of the Three Gorges Project from Weibo to conduct senti­
ment classification using a lexicon-based sentiment analysis algorithm.
Similarly, Tang et al. [81] carried out a sentiment analysis on the Twitter
data of four groups (construction workers, construction companies,
construction unions, and construction media) in the United States to
understand the views of different construction communities on the
construction industry and the focus of daily concern. Nik-Bakht and El-
Diraby [69] also collected feeds for 23 (out of the top 100) infrastructure
projects in North America and analyzed the data from two dimensions of
topic modeling and sentiment classification utilizing a new term
importance measurement method based on modified TF-IDF. However,
the categories of sentiment adopted in the above studies were only two
or three. Wang et al. [88], therefore, extended the emotions to seven
(interest, disgust, happiness, sadness, fear, shock, anger) to analyze the
Chinese public attitudes towards off-site construction based on Weibo
data in more detail. Following up the research of [81], Tang et al. [80]
further crawled the Weibo data of four construction groups in China to
compare the similarities and differences of the public perspectives of the
construction industry in China and the United States. As time pass by,
the focus of public concern is gradually changing. To capture the
changes, Xue et al. [92] developed a dynamic topic model based on LDA
to reveal the trends in public concerns over time and the relevance be­
tween each public concern and stakeholder. The news report is also a
kind of social media that contains valuable information by analyzing
facts and interviewing experts. For example, Zhou et al. [114] combined
the keyword association rule mining (Apriori) and NER to extract
infrastructure failure interdependencies (IFIs) and identify affected
stakeholders from the social news of water pipe bursts, providing
valuable references for decision-makers in the process of infrastructure
management. Li et al. [47] identified 79 obstacle factors from the news
reports on China’s prefabricated buildings (PBs) via content analysis and
ranked the factors according to their importance calculated by TF-IDF to
help the stakeholders in the Chinese PBs industry better understand the
barriers hindering the industry development.
3.3.6.2. Scene understanding. To understand text-based on-site inspec­
tion scenes and improve the decision-making process, Lin et al. [49]
introduced keyword extraction and topic modeling to identify major
concerns and their dynamics of on-site issues for a better decision-
making process. For image scene understanding, Liu et al. [54] devel­
oped a cross-modal NLG model combining word embedding, CNN, and
LSTM to generate sentences describing the main content of the image,
which is of great significance for vision-based intelligent monitoring.
Y. Ding et al.
3.3.6.3. Maintenance requests analysis. With the popularization of
informatization, the number of electronic maintenance requests has
increased dramatically. To assist in dealing with massive electronic
maintenance requests, Bortolini and Forcada [11] used word cloud
technology to visualize keywords extracted from electronic maintenance
requests to identify common keywords of maintenance requests with
different severity and thus, increase the productivity of facility man­
agers for making control and preventive strategies. Mo et al. [64]
transformed the task of maintenance staff assignment into a classifica­
tion problem and fitted an ML-based classification model to determine
the appropriate workforce by learning from past staff assignment cases.
Finally, the logistic regression model achieved the best performance in
predicting crew and maintenance priority.
3.3.6.4. Other applications. Other applications of NLP in the construc­
tion field include CM, SRA, WCA. For example, Williams and Gong [89]
developed an ensemble stacking model to recognize projects completed
near the original low bid and projects completed with large cost over­
runs by using N-Gram, TF-IDF, and SVD in an integrated software (Rapid
Miner). Lin et al. [52] analyzed the interview corpus of 25 construction
industry practitioners using the text processing tool (Leximancer) to
generate concept maps and topics and discuss the influence of stake­
holders on the implementation of social responsibility. Zheng et al.
[104] crawled a large number of job advertisements to extract the
competency topics of the construction project manager (CPM) empha­
sized in the advertisement and thus, track the demands for CPM com­
petencies at the industry level and give the different emphases of
different scale companies for the competency of CPM.
4. Discussion
This section discusses the current challenges, possible solutions, and
future research trends of NLP applications in the construction field.
Though pure theoretical challenges are important, such as the proposal
of new NLP algorithms or the improvement of old algorithms, they are
not the focus of this section.
4.1. Challenges
First of all, data has become the foundation research threshold in the
big data artificial intelligence era. It is difficult to fit a sufficiently
intelligent and general AI agent without enough data. The most
advanced CV and NLP studies are based on tens of millions of large
datasets. For example, ImageNet [21] is a database commonly used in
the CV area, containing 14 million images. The training corpus of GPT-3
reaches 45 Terabytes [12]. However, the volume of most datasets used
in the selected articles is not very large, of which 87.8% are less than
10,000 (Table 5). In addition, researchers in this field were reluctant to
disclose and share the datasets they processed/labeled, making the
relevant datasets difficult to access. The phenomenon of data monopoly
in this field is serious. For example, nearly 40% of the selected articles
did not publish data or data sources (Table 4), and only one research
[54] shared the processed and annotated data (Table 5). Therefore,
breaking the data monopoly and obtaining enough high-quality datasets
in this field is also a great challenge. The third challenge is related to
data diversity. With the maturity of hardware technology, various
equipment has been gradually used in many construction projects to
assist and facilitate daily management. The formats or types of data
produced from different devices are different, including text data (e.g.,
from electronic documents), image data (e.g., from surveillance cameras
or drones), sensor data (e.g., from wearable devices), and audio data (e.
g., recording of the radio calls). Thus, the challenge mainly lies in fusing
different kinds of data to develop a more comprehensive model with
higher performance. The future studies, in this case, might no longer be
pure NLP tasks, and NLP is just a part of the research.
15
Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169
The other challenges may lie in the degree of automation/intelli­
gence, mainly in knowledge extraction and reasoning. Many knowledge
extractions in the selected articles are generally based on manually
predefined rules. For example, many regulations/constraints in the ACC
domain were extracted according to the artificial rules. On the other
hand, the current reasoning method in ACC is the low-level reasoning
method based on First Order Logic (FOL), which requires that the
extracted regulations/constraints be logically represented in FOL format
for the subsequent reasoning. Therefore, the current ACC implementa­
tions can only be called semi-automation in a strict sense, and advanced
extraction and high-level reasoning models are needed to eliminate
these transformation rules to achieve full automation. However, when
trying to implement full-automation and high-level reasoning, the
challenge of high-level text understanding will occur because both
knowledge extraction and reasoning are based on the understanding of
the text. In short, full automation and its supporting methods, high-level
understanding and reasoning, are the technical challenges both at pre­
sent and in the future.
4.2. Possible solutions
The best way to solve the challenges related to data scale and mo­
nopoly is to encourage researchers to open source data and code, which
greatly help expand datasets and improve models through the power of
the community. Some business data can also be shared after desensiti­
zation. In addition, web crawlers can automatically and quickly obtain a
large amount of public data from the world wide web, which has become
one of the popular means of data acquisition in the context of the big
data era (one of the burst keywords in Section 2.4). Therefore, the
reasonable use of web crawlers can also solve the problem of insufficient
data to a certain extent. For those studies with few samples and unable to
expand data, some targeted methods can be adopted appropriately, such
as semi-supervised learning, few-shot learning, transfer learning,
knowledge distillation, federated transfer learning, and pre-training
model method. Both federated transfer learning and pre-training
model method are based on the idea of transfer learning. Federated
transfer learning realizes the encryption and sharing training of sensitive
data, while the pre-training model method trains the model on the large
corpus then fine-tunes for the specific NLP tasks.
For addressing other challenges, developing an end-to-end neural
network may be the better choice. Firstly, compared with other
methods, the neural network is easier to achieve the cross-modal fusion
of multiple types of data, well solving the challenge of data diversity.
Besides, the end-to-end network can eliminate the intermediate manual
processes to the greatest extent, making the whole process from raw data
to results be completed by the model. The end-to-end neural network of
NLG is one of the fully automatic models that can convert other types of
data to text form, which has various applications such as regulations/
constraints extraction, answers generation, etc. The middle layer output
of the NLG model can be regarded as the representation of transformed
knowledge and can be used as a feature extractor. The neural network
can also be used for reasoning over text. For example, Gupta et al. [29]
developed an end-to-end text reasoning network based on Neural
Module Networks (NMN), providing an interpretable neural network
model for text reasoning. Combining the NLG and reasoning network
into one end-to-end network is also feasible to implement the one-step
completion from knowledge extraction to reasoning, which might be
suitable for ACC. Finally, dynamic representation methods, such as
BERT and GPT, are preferred to be used for word/sentence/text repre­
sentation since they have the highest level of text understanding ability
and achieve SOTA performance. Some pioneer researches that combined
the above technologies have been carried out in the construction field.
For example, Zhong et al. [105] developed an NLG model based on the
BERT model to automatically generate answers from the relevant par­
agraphs, and Liu et al. [54] implemented a cross-modal NLG model to
generate description sentences for images.
Y. Ding et al. Automation in Construction 136 (2022) 104169

Table 7
A simple roadmap for the future trends.
At present Next 3–5 years Distant future

Industry status Low-level automation Whole process automation Multi-agent automation cooperation
• More open-source research Open source becomes
Data Data monopoly
• Public/web data received great attention standard
End-to-end pre-trained
Dominant technologies Machine learning and neural networks More advanced models
neural networks
• AA/SM, BIM, ACC
AA/SM, BIM, ACC
Research directions • Diversify and concretize (SMA, SU, MRA, SR, etc.) Interdisciplinary research is the norm
Pure NLP research
• Preliminary interdisciplinary research (SU + ACC)

4.3. Future trends 5. Conclusion

Based on the above discussion of the current research status, this
section boldly discusses the future trend of NLP in construction-related
fields. A simple roadmap was given in Table 7. Note that this section
will mainly discuss the research trends in the next 3–5 years, and the
distant future is beyond the discussion scope.
First of all, open access to data and source code will be one of the
possible trends in this field. By condensing many excellent researchers
and ideas, the research will achieve iterative development and make
continuous progress. A good example is deep learning, whose recent
blowout development and brilliant achievements are due to the joint
efforts of many open source tools, public data, and a wide range of
excellent developers. In addition, given great advantages, web crawlers
will play a more significant role in data acquisition in the future. As
mentioned above, there would be less pure NLP research but more cross-
modal studies based on multi-type data fusion in the future. In terms of
technology and tool, end-to-end neural networks, especially the end-to-
end pre-trained neural network models, will be the mainstream tech­
nology in this field in the future. The end-to-end pre-trained neural
network is an ideal model that might possibly address the challenges of
data scale, cross-modal data fusion, full automation, high-level under­
standing, and high-level reasoning at the same time. Currently, ac­
cording to Section 3, there are just a few studies based on the pre-trained
neural network. However, given such great advantages as mentioned,
research based on the end-to-end pre-trained neural network will usher
in explosive growth in the next few years, especially in the application of
higher-level understanding, reasoning.
Trends for future research directions mainly consist of two parts.
From the analysis in Section 2, the current hot studies related to NLP in
construction domains include accident analysis/safety management,
BIM, and ACC. However, the NLP technologies used in these domains are
still not intelligent enough, which was mainly reflected in low-level text
understanding and reasoning ability and the following consequence,
low-level automation. Therefore, these research domains will continue
to receive significant attention in the future with the support of more
advanced new technologies like the end-to-end pre-trained model. In
addition, there are some emerging directions according to the “others”
in Table 3, such as SMA, SU, MRA, SR, and WCA, indicating that future
research directions may gradually diversify and concretize. These new
emerging directions may also be applied in or combined with the orig­
inal hot domains, resulting in new applications. For example, the com­
bination of SU and ACC technologies can monitor workers’ safety
behavior. In this case, the intelligent agent needs to identify, extract and
understand the relevant safety construction rules from the specification
documents then assist the vision system in capturing the unsafe behavior
of workers based on SU. Similarly, SU and ACC can be used for
compliance inspection of construction processes. Another feasible
example is to analyze the role of social media in worker safety man­
agement and accident prevention.
In this paper, 91 NLP-related articles in construction-related areas
were selected manually from thousands of articles. A systematic scien­
tometric analysis was then carried out by CiteSpace and VOSviewer to
reveal the development patterns, crucial studies, and research trends of
the NLP application in those areas. After that, the authors comprehen­
sively introduce NLP applications of the selected articles from three
aspects, including datasets and sources, technologies and tools, and
application and progress. At the end of this paper, the authors discuss
some challenges faced by the current NLP-related research in
construction-related fields, followed by some possible solutions and the
forecasting of future research trends. The main contributions and sig­
nificance of this paper are as follows: 1) This paper might be the first
review paper focusing on the NLP application in construction-related
fields; 2) A systematic scientometric analysis and multi-aspects sum­
mary of NLP-related research in the construction field were conducted;
3) The results of multi-aspects summary provide sufficient support for
researchers who want to start NLP research in the construction field,
from data acquisition, technology and tool selection to the current
research status; 4) Some enlightening ideas for further research di­
rections were also provided to the readers by discussing the current
challenges, possible solutions, and future research trends.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Shenzhen Science and Technology
Innovation Committee Grant (PJ#JCYJ20180507181647320). The
conclusions herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
the views of the sponsoring agency.
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