Most of the existing automated code compliance checking (ACC) methods are unable to fully automatically convert complex building-code requirements into computer-processable forms. Such complex requirements usually have hierarchically complex clause and sentence structures. There is, thus, a need to decompose such complex requirements into hierarchies of much smaller, manageable requirement units that would be processable using most of the existing ACC methods. Rule-based methods have been used to deal with such complex requirements and have achieved high performance. However, they lack scalability, because the rules are developed manually and need to be updated and/or adapted when applied to a different type of building code. More research is, thus, needed to develop a scalable method to automatically convert the complex requirements into hierarchies of requirement units to facilitate the succeeding steps of ACC such as information extraction and compliance reasoning. To address this need, this paper proposes a new, machine learning-based method to automatically extract requirement hierarchies from building codes. The proposed method consists of five main steps: (1) data preparation and preprocessing; (2) data adaptation; (3) deep neural network model training for dependency parsing; (4) automated requirement segmentation and restriction interpretation based on the extracted dependencies; and (5) evaluation. The proposed method was trained using the English Treebank data; and was tested on sentences from the 2009 International Building Code (IBC) and the Champaign 2015 IBC Amendments. The preliminary results show that the proposed method achieved an average normalized edit distance of 0.32, a precision of 89%, a recall of 76%, and an F1-measure of 82%, which indicates good requirement hierarchy extraction performance.
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This content will become publicly available on March 18, 2025
Application of Graph Convolutional Networks to Classification of Building Code Requirements
A building must meet various requirements during the design and construction process to ensure the benefits of stakeholders and well-being of construction workers and occupants. These requirements may come from different functional areas such as structure, electricity, and fire protection, and focus on different building materials, such as concrete, steel, and glass. They may overlap or even conflict with each other. In order to identify the sources and focus of building code requirements and further clarify the relationships between them, this paper presents some recent results on using graphic convolutional networks (GCN) to classify building code requirements. One hundred building code provisions were randomly selected from the International Building Code 2015 and labeled into six categories manually, and a cutting-edge GCN model was trained to classify them. Experimental results showed an average precision of 91.67% and an average recall of 94.44% when 10% of the data was used for testing, which is comparable to the 84.30% precision and 97.30% recall of the state-of-the-art machine learning-based approaches applied on construction document classification. The effect of the size of training data on testing accuracy was also discussed in this paper.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1827733
- PAR ID:
- 10518078
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Society of Civil Engineers
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9780784485262
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 836 to 845
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Des Moines, Iowa
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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