Semantic Information Extraction of Energy Requirements from Contract Specifications: Dealing with Complex Extraction Tasks
Publication: Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering
Volume 36, Issue 5
Abstract
Automated specification energy compliance checking aims to check the compliance of building designs captured in building information models (BIMs) with energy requirements from contract specifications. However, automated extraction of requirements from specifications to support automated compliance checking is challenging because of the text complexities of the specifications, including hierarchically complex text structures, incomplete sentence structures, and a variety of levels of development (LODs). To address this challenge, this paper proposes a semantic information extraction method to extract building energy requirements automatically from specifications. Specifically, three new submethods are proposed to deal with these complexities: a domain-specific text splitting and stitching method, an incompleteness-aware sequential dependency extraction method, and a detail-aware LOD extraction method. The proposed information extraction method was tested in extracting thermal-insulation and lighting-power requirements from MasterFormat specifications. A performance of 96.8% recall and 97.6% precision was achieved on the testing data, which indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request (extraction rules, tagging rules for domain-specific tags and for recognizing the action verbs, domain-specific POS tagger, and testing data set).
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the National Science Foundation (NSF). This material is based upon work supported by the NSF under Grant No. 1201170. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.
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Published In
Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering
Volume 36 • Issue 5 • September 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 24, 2021
Accepted: Oct 27, 2021
Published online: Jul 6, 2022
Published in print: Sep 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Dec 6, 2022
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