NLP and deep learning-based analysis of building regulations to support automated rule checking system

This paper aims to describe a natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning-based approach for supporting automated rule checking system. Automated rule checking has been developed in various ways and enhanced the efficiency of building design review process. Converting human-readable building regulations to computer-readable format is, however, still time-consuming and error-prone due to the nature of human languages. Several domain-independent efforts have been made for NLP, and this paper focuses on how computers can be able to understand semantic meaning of building regulations to intelligently automate rule interpretation process. This paper proposes a semantic analysis process of regulatory sentences and its utilization for rule checking system. The proposed process is composed of following steps: 1) learning semantics of words and sentences, 2) utilization of semantic analysis. For semantic analysis, we use word embedding technique which converts meaning of words in numerical values. By using those values, computers can extract related words and classify the topic of sentences. The results of the semantic analysis can elaborate the interpretation with domain-specific knowledge. This paper also shows a demonstration of the proposed approach.