Semantic Information Extraction of Energy Requirements from Contract Specifications: Dealing with Complex Extraction Tasks

Automated specification energy compliance checking aims to check the compliance of building designs captured in building information models (BIMs) with energy requirements from contract specifications. However, automated extraction of requirements from specifications to support automated compliance checking is challenging because of the text complexities of the specifications, including hierarchically complex text structures, incomplete sentence structures, and a variety of levels of development (LODs). To address this challenge, this paper proposes a semantic information extraction method to extract building energy requirements automatically from specifications. Specifically, three new submethods are proposed to deal with these complexities: a domain-specific text splitting and stitching method, an incompleteness-aware sequential dependency extraction method, and a detail-aware LOD extraction method. The proposed information extraction method was tested in extracting thermal-insulation and lighting-power requirements from MasterFormat specifications. A performance of 96.8% recall and 97.6% precision was achieved on the testing data, which indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method.