Natural Language Processing for Construction Management: A Literature Review
Publication: Construction Research Congress 2024
ABSTRACT
Automation in construction is essential to improve the efficiency of this sector. There have been many advancements in this field, and the use of natural language processing (NLP) has attracted increasing interest in recent years. This systematic literature review considers the contributions made in the past decade in the specific domain of implementation of NLP models in the commercial construction industry to help improve efficiency in project management. The review focuses on identifying relevant research efforts and their contributions, analyzing the NLP techniques used and results achieved, and determining the gaps and limitations based on the literature. Reviewed articles were selected from a total of 565 records retrieved from the Scopus, ASCE, and ProQuest databases. The articles were then filtered, classified, summarized, and analyzed. The review resulted in the identification of 19 most interesting articles in which the developed technologies have the potential of immediate applications in different project phases—from documentation and bidding, project closeout, to post-construction facility management. It was concluded that improving and automating the processes in these project phases with NLP resulted in increased project efficiency. Some gaps and limitations in the literature review were identified, and recommendations for future research were provided.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this chapter.
REFERENCES
Abdelaty, A., and Nesselhauf, K. (2020). “Using Basic Natural Language Processing for Effective Project Closeout Process.” Proc., Construction Research Congress 2020: Project Management and Controls, Materials, and Contracts, ASCE, Reston, VA, 1111–1118.
Akanbi, T., and Zhang, J. (2020). “Automated Design Information Extraction from Construction Specifications to Support Wood Construction Cost Estimation.” Proc., Construction Research Congress 2020: Project Management and Controls, Materials, and Contracts, ASCE, Reston, VA, 658–666.
Akanbi, T., Zhang, J., and Lee, Y. C. (2019). “Automated Item Matching and Pricing (IMP) for Wood Building Elements to Support BIM-Based Wood Construction Cost Estimation.” Proc., Computing in Civil Engineering 2019: Visualization, Information Modeling, and Simulation, ASCE, Reston, VA, 402–409.
Caldas, C. H., Soibelman, L., and Han, J. (2002). “Automated Classification of Construction Project Documents.” Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 16(4), 234–243.
Chen, J.-H., Su, M.-C., Azzizi, V. T., Wang, T.-K., and Lin, W.-J. (2021). “Smart Project Management: Interactive Platform Using Natural Language Processing Technology.” Applied Sciences, 11(4), 1597.
Fuchs, S. (2021). Natural Language Processing for Building Code Interpretation: Systematic Literature Review Report. <https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29107.55845>(August 21, 2023).
Jafari, P., Al Hattab, M., Mohamed, E., and AbouRizk, S. (2021). “Automated Extraction and Time-Cost Prediction of Contractual Reporting Requirements in Construction Using Natural Language Processing and Simulation.” Applied Sciences, 11(13), 6188.
Jallow, A. K., Demian, P., Anumba, C. J., and Baldwin, A. N. (2017). “An enterprise architecture framework for electronic requirements information management.” International Journal of Information Management, 37(5), 455–472.
Khalef, R., and El-adaway, I. H. (2021). “Automated Identification of Substantial Changes in Construction Projects of Airport Improvement Program: Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Comparative Analysis.” Journal of Management in Engineering, 37(6), 04021062.
Ko, T., and Jeong, H. D. (2020). “Syntactic Approach to Extracting Key Elements of Work Modification Cause in Change-Order Documents.” Proc., Construction Research Congress 2020: Project Management and Controls, Materials, and Contracts, ASCE, Reston, VA, 134–142.
Lee, J., and Yi, J.-S. (2017). “Predicting Project’s Uncertainty Risk in the Bidding Process by Integrating Unstructured Text Data and Structured Numerical Data Using Text Mining.” Applied Sciences, 7(11), 1141.
Lee, J., Yi, J.-S., and Son, J. (2019). “Development of Automatic-Extraction Model of Poisonous Clauses in International Construction Contracts Using Rule-Based NLP.” Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 33(3), 04019003.
Manning, C., and Schutze H. (1999). Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, <https://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/>(Nov. 28, 2021).
Mo, Y., Zhao, D., Du, J., Syal, M., Aziz, A., and Li, H. (2020). “Automated Staff Assignment for Building Maintenance Using Natural Language Processing.” Automation in Construction, 113(May 2020), 103150.
Moon, S., Lee, G., Chi, S., and Oh, H. (2021). “Automated Construction Specification Review with Named Entity Recognition Using Natural Language Processing.” Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 147(1), 04020147.
Moon, S., Shin, Y., Hwang, B.-G., and Chi, S. (2018). “Document Management System Using Text Mining for Information Acquisition of International Construction.” KSCE Journal of Civil Engineering, 22(12), 4791–4798.
al Qady, M., and Kandil, A. (2013). “Document Discourse for Managing Construction Project Documents.” Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 27(5), 466–475.
al Qady, M., and Kandil, A. (2010). “Concept Relation Extraction from Construction Documents Using Natural Language Processing.” Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 136(3), 294–302.
Ren, R., and Zhang, J. (2021). “Semantic Rule-Based Construction Procedural Information Extraction to Guide Jobsite Sensing and Monitoring.” Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 35(6), 04021026.
Tixier, A. J. P., Hallowell, M. R., Rajagopalan, B., and Bowman, D. (2016). “Automated Content Analysis for Construction Safety: A Natural Language Processing System to Extract Precursors and Outcomes from Unstructured Injury Reports.” Automation in Construction, 62(February 2016), 45–56.
Torkanfar, N., and Azar, E. R. (2020). “Quantitative Similarity Assessment of Construction Projects Using WBS-based Metrics.” Advanced Engineering Informatics, 46(October 2020), 101179.
Wu, C., Wu, P., Wang, J., Jiang, R., Chen, M., and Wang, X. (2021). “Developing a Hybrid Approach to Extract Constraints Related Information for Constraint Management.” Automation in Construction, 124(April 2021), 103563.
Yu, M., and Tsai, M. (2021). “ACS: Construction Data Auto-Correction System-Taiwan Public Construction Data Example.” Sustainability, 13(1), 362.
Zou, Y., Kiviniemi, A., and Jones, S. W. (2017). “Retrieving similar cases for construction project risk management using Natural Language Processing techniques.” Automation in Construction, 80(August 2017), 66–76.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
History
Published online: Mar 18, 2024
ASCE Technical Topics:
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.