Browsing by Author "Barry, David"
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Item Open Access An NLP framework for extracting causes, consequences, and hazards from occurrence reports to validate a HAZOP study(IEEE, 2022-10-31) Ricketts, Jonathan; Pelham, Joni; Barry, David; Guo, WeisiA substantial amount of effort and resource is applied to the design of aircraft systems to reduce risk to life and improve safety. This is often applied through a variety of safety assessment methods, one of which being Hazard and Operability (HAZOP) Studies. Once an air system is in-service, it is common for flight data to be collected and analysed to validate the original safety assessment. However, the operator of the air system generates and stores a substantial amount of safety knowledge within free-text occurrence reports. These allow maintainers and aircrew to report occurrences, often describing hazards and associated detail revealing consequences and causes. A lack of resource means it is difficult for safety professionals to manually review these occurrences and although occurrences are classified against a set taxonomy (e.g., birdstrike, technical failure) this lacks the granularity to apply to a specific safety analysis. To resolve this, the paper presents the development of a novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) framework for extracting causes, consequences, and hazards from free-text occurrence reports in order to validate and inform an aircraft sub-system HAZOP study. Specifically using a combination of rule-based phrase matching with a spaCy Named Entity Recognition (NER) model. It is suggested that the framework could form a continual improvement process whereby the findings drive updates to the HAZOP, in turn updating the rules and model, therefore improving accuracy and hazard identification over time.Item Open Access A scoping literature review of natural language processing application to safety occurrence reports(MDPI, 2023-04-05) Ricketts, Jon; Barry, David; Guo, Weisi; Pelham, JonathanSafety occurrence reports can contain valuable information on how incidents occur, revealing knowledge that can assist safety practitioners. This paper presents and discusses a literature review exploring how Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been applied to occurrence reports within safety-critical industries, informing further research on the topic and highlighting common challenges. Some of the uses of NLP include the ability for occurrence reports to be automatically classified against categories, and entities such as causes and consequences to be extracted from the text as well as the semantic searching of occurrence databases. The review revealed that machine learning models form the dominant method when applying NLP, although rule-based algorithms still provide a viable option for some entity extraction tasks. Recent advances in deep learning models such as Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding are now achieving a high accuracy while eliminating the need to substantially pre-process text. The construction of safety-themed datasets would be of benefit for the application of NLP to occurrence reporting, as this would allow the fine-tuning of current language models to safety tasks. An interesting approach is the use of topic modelling, which represents a shift away from the prescriptive classification taxonomies, splitting data into “topics”. Where many papers focus on the computational accuracy of models, they would also benefit from real-world trials to further inform usefulness. It is anticipated that NLP will soon become a mainstream tool used by safety practitioners to efficiently process and gain knowledge from safety-related text.