Automated Construction Activities Extraction from Accident Reports Using Deep Neural Network and Natural Language Processing Techniques

Construction is among the most dangerous industries with numerous accidents occurring at job sites. Following an accident, an investigation report is issued, containing all of the specifics. Analyzing the text information in construction accident reports can help enhance our understanding of historical data and be utilized for accident prevention. However, the conventional method requires a significant amount of time and effort to read and identify crucial information. The previous studies primarily focused on analyzing related objects and causes of accidents rather than the construction activities. This study aims to extract construction activities taken by workers associated with accidents by presenting an automated framework that adopts a deep learning-based approach and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automatically classify sentences obtained from previous construction accident reports into predefined categories, namely TRADE (i.e., a construction activity before an accident), EVENT (i.e., an accident), and CONSEQUENCE (i.e., the outcome of an accident). The classification model was developed using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) showed a robust accuracy of 88.7%, indicating that the proposed model is capable of investigating the occurrence of accidents with minimal manual involvement and sophisticated engineering. Also, this study is expected to support safety assessments and build risk management systems.