Automated text classification of near-misses from safety reports: An improved deep learning approach

Examining past near-miss reports can provide us with information that can be used to learn about how we can mitigate and control hazards that materialise on construction sites. Yet, the process of analysing near-miss reports can be a time-consuming and labour-intensive process. However, automatic text classification using machine learning and ontology-based approaches can be used to mine reports of this nature. Such approaches tend to suffer from the problem of weak generalisation, which can adversely affect the classification performance. To address this limitation and improve classification accuracy, we develop an improved deep learning-based approach to automatically classify near-miss information contained within safety reports using Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (BERT). Our proposed approach is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations by jointly extracting context features in all layers. We validate the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach using a database of near-miss reports derived from actual construction projects that were used to train and test our model. The results demonstrate that our approach can accurately classify 'near misses', and outperform prevailing state-of-the-art automatic text classification approaches. Understanding the nature of near-misses can provide site managers with the ability to identify work-areas and instances where the likelihood of an accident may occur.