A critical review of text-based research in construction: Data source, analysis method, and implications

The advancement of natural language processing and text mining techniques facilitate automatic non-trivial pattern extraction and knowledge discovery from text data. However, text-based research has received less attention compared to image- and sensor-based research in the construction industry. Hence, this paper performs a comprehensive review to understand the current state and future insights of text analytics focusing on the data source and analysis method. This study identifies various kinds of text data sources from project documents as well as open data in the websites. In addition, the review finds that the ontology- and rule-based approach has been dominant, at the same time, recent research has attempted to apply the state-of-the-art machine learning methods. It is envisioned that there are potential advancements in construction engineering and management based on the latest text analysis methods along with the enriched data by the digital transformation.