Understanding On-Site Inspection of Construction Projects Based on Keyword Extraction and Topic Modeling

Abstract

As an essential way to ensure success of construction projects, on-site inspection involves intensive paperwork, while generating large amounts of textual data. Lack of understanding of information hidden in text-based inspection records always leads to overlooking of important issues and deferred decisions. Therefore, a novel text mining approach based on keyword extraction and topic modeling is introduced to identify key concerns and their dynamics of on-site issues for better decision-making process. Then, the proposed approach was demonstrated in a real world project and tested with 7250 issue records. Results showed that the proposed method could successfully extract key concerns hidden in texts and identify their changes with time, thereby enabling a more efficient on-site inspection and data-centric decisionmaking process. This research contributes: (1) to the body of knowledge a new framework for discovering key concerns and their changes with time in texts, and (2) to the state of practice by providing insights on hot topics and their changes with time to reduce on-site issues and make decisions efficiently.

Issue Identification of Overseas Construction Markets from News Articles Based on BERTopic

“…토픽 모델링은 대량의 텍스트 문서 집합에서 주요 주제를 파악하기 위해 사용되는 기법이다 (Wallach, 2006). 건설자 동화 분야에서도 안전사고 뉴스 (Lee, 2018), Building Information Modeling(BIM) 관련 논문 (Choo et al, 2019), 현 장 검사 보고서 (Lin et al, 2020), 건설 소송 사례 (Jallan et al, 2019) (Moon et al, 2018), 현장 검측 데이터를 활용하여 불확실성을 판단하는 연구도 수행된 바 있 다 (Lin et al, 2020). 중국에서는 웹사이트 Weibo에 작성된 글 을 분석하여 건설산업에 대한 기피 현상을 분석하기도 했다 (Hou et al, 2022).…”

From Design Changes to Lawsuits: An Exploratory Study Using Text Analytics Based on Legal Case Database

“…For example, Jallan et al (2019) used a topic model to examine patterns in the technical details of construction-defect litigation on LexisNexis. Lin et al (2020) utilized topic modelling to identify frequent issues hidden in on-site inspection records.…”

“…In construction management research, topic modelling was used to help retrieve information from unstructured construction documents. For example, LDA topic modelling has successfully identified key concerns hidden in on-site inspection records and obtained their changes with time (Lin et al, 2020). In that way, it helps improve the efficiency of on-site inspection and decision-making.…”

Analysis of Risk Factors of Coal Chemical Enterprises Based on Text Mining

“…In the safety field, many scholars use text mining technology to analyze coal mines, rail transit, ship collision, aviation, and other accidents, extract the causes of accidents, and then put forward practical safety management suggestions. For example, Lin developed a text mining method based on keyword extraction and topic modeling to identify the key concerns and dynamics of on-site inspection problems of construction projects to make decisions better [ 38 ]. Sarkar developed a text-mining-based prediction model by using fault tree analysis (FTA), and Bayesian network (BN) could predict the occurrence of accidents attributable to different primary causes [ 39 ].…”