Computer Representation of Building Codes using Natural Language Processing (NLP) Techniques

We are living in buildings that are designed and constructed based on a set of rules to make sure of solidity and safety. Buildings should comply to the set of rules throughout its lifecycle like design, construction and demolition. These set of rules are complex and often changing regulations in other words codes and guidelines. In order to guarantee the safety of users, structural stability and solidity, code compliance check is a vital process during the design and construction phases of the building [1]. Nowadays the checking process is performed manually by consultants and experts from the field and also building permission authorities. Because it also involves several disciplines to go through this process, it often leads to problems, delays, inconsistencies. It makes a cumbersome and error-prone process. In order to reduce these problems, there has been lots of research ongoing in automation of code compliance check. With the help of the enormous progress in Building Information Modeling and technical development, researchers can offer various approaches and applications. One of these is “Automated Code Compliance Check Based on Visual Language” [2]. The other one is “Extracting Implementable Methods for Automated Code Compliance Check” [3]. In that project, researchers wanted to improve rule based approach with high-level methods. In this project, we aimed to present a new approach to automate code compliance check with Natural Language Processing (NLP). For this purpose, we want to show the advantages and disadvantages of the Natural Language Processing Approach in comparison to Rule Based Approach. In the second part, we investigated several techniques in NLP to find out the best method for this project. In the third part, we applied the NLP technique to extract “components” from the code compliance guideline.     «

We are living in buildings that are designed and constructed based on a set of rules to make sure of solidity and safety. Buildings should comply to the set of rules throughout its lifecycle like design, construction and demolition. These set of rules are complex and often changing regulations in other words codes and guidelines. In order to guarantee the safety of users, structural stability and solidity, code compliance check is a vital process during the design and construction phases of the...     »