Development of a Site Information Classification Model and a Similar-Site Accident Retrieval Model for Construction Using the KLUE-BERT Model

Before starting any construction work, providing workers with awareness about past similar accident cases is effective in preventing mishaps. Based on construction accident reports, this study developed two models to identify past accidents at sites with similar site information. The site information includes 16 parameters, such as type of work, type of accident, the work in which the accident occurred, weather conditions, contract conditions, type of work, etc. The first model, the site information classification model, uses named entity recognition tasks to classify site information, which is extracted from accident reports. The second model, the similar-site accident retrieval model, which finds the most similar accidents that occurred in the past from input site information, uses a semantic textual similarity task to match the classified information with it. A total of 17,707 accident reports from South Korean construction sites were found; these models were trained to use Korean Language Understanding Evaluation–Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (KLUE-BERT) for processing. The first model achieved an average accuracy of 0.928, and the second model was precisely matched, with a mean cosine similarity score exceeding 0.90. These models could identify and provide workers with similar past accidents, enabling proactive safety measures, such as site-specific hazard identification and worker education, thereby allowing recognition of construction safety risks before starting work. By integrating site information with historical data, the models offer an effective approach to improving construction safety.