A C-BiLSTM approach to classify construction accident reports

Abstract

The construction sector is widely recognized as having the most hazardous working environment among the various business sectors, and many research studies have focused on injury prevention strategies for use on construction sites. The risk-based theory emphasizes the analysis of accident causes extracted from accident reports to understand, predict, and prevent the occurrence of construction accidents. The first step in the analysis is to classify the incidents from a massive number of reports into different cause categories, a task which is usually performed on a manual basis by domain experts. The research described in this paper proposes a convolutional bidirectional long short-term memory (C-BiLSTM)-based method to automatically classify construction accident reports. The proposed approach was applied on a dataset of construction accident narratives obtained from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration website, and the results indicate that this model performs better than some of the classic machine learning models commonly used in classification tasks, including support vector machine (SVM), naïve Bayes (NB), and logistic regression (LR). The results of this study can help safety managers to develop risk management strategies.