Integrating Natural Language Processing and Spatial Reasoning for Utility Compliance Checking

AbstractUnderground utility incidents, such as utility conflicts and utility strikes, result in time and cost overruns in construction projects, property damages, environmental pollution, personnel injuries, and fatalities. A main cause of recurrent utility incidents is the noncompliance with the spatial configurations between utilities and their surroundings. Utility specifications usually contain textual descriptions of the spatial configurations. However, detection of spatial defects, according to the textual descriptions, is difficult and time consuming. This deficiency is because of the lack of spatial cognition in many rule-checking systems to process massive amounts of data. This study aims to automate utility compliance checking by integrating natural language processing (NLP) and spatial reasoning. NLP algorithm translates the textual descriptions of spatial configurations into computer-processable spatial rules. Spatial reasoning executes the extracted spatial rules following a logical order in ...

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