Antoine J.?P. Tixier|Matthew R. Hallowell|Balaji Rajagopalan|Dean Bowman
Automated content analysis for construction safety: A natural language processing system to extract precursors and outcomes from unstructured injury reports
University of Colorado Boulder|University of Colorado Boulder|Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences|Bentley Systems (United States)
united states like many countries throughout globe construction workers likely injured job workers industry poor safety performance responsible huge human financial losses motivated extensive research unfortunately safety improvement construction decelerated last decade traditional safety programs reached saturation yet major construction companies federal agencies possess wealth empirical knowledge form huge databases digital construction injury reports knowledge could used better understand predict prevent occurrence construction accidents unfortunately due lack clear methodology high costs manual largescale content analysis valuable data yet extracted leveraged recently researchers proposed framework allowing meaningful empirical data extracted accident reports however resource limitations inherent manual content analysis still remain present study tested proposition manual content analysis injury reports eliminated using natural language processing nlp paper describes 1 overall strategy methodology used developing system specifically key challenges decoding unstructured reports overcome 2 system built iterative process coding testing manual content analysis results team seven independent analysts 3 implications potential uses data extracted results indicate nlp system capable quickly automatically scanning unstructured injury reports 101 attributes outcomes 95 accuracy main contribution research empower organization quickly obtain large highly reliable structured attribute outcome data set databases unstructured accident reports structured data necessary prerequisite application statistical modeling techniques allowing extraction new safety knowledge finally amelioration safety management