Automatic Extraction of Flooding Control Knowledge from Rich Literature Texts Using Deep Learning

Flood control is a global problem; increasing number of flooding disasters occur annually induced by global climate change and extreme weather events. Flood studies are important knowledge sources for flood risk reduction and have been recorded in the academic literature. The main objective of this paper was to acquire flood control knowledge from long-tail data of the literature by using deep learning techniques. Screening was conducted to obtain 4742 flood-related academic documents from past two decades. Machine learning was conducted to parse the documents, and 347 sample data points from different years were collected for sentence segmentation (approximately 61,000 sentences) and manual annotation. Traditional machine learning (NB, LR, SVM, and RF) and artificial neural network-based deep learning algorithms (Bert, Bert-CNN, Bert-RNN, and ERNIE) were implemented for model training, and complete sentence-level knowledge extraction was conducted in batches. The results revealed that artificial neural network-based deep learning methods exhibit better performance than traditional machine learning methods in terms of accuracy, but their training time is much longer. Based on comprehensive feature extraction capability and computational efficiency, the performances of deep learning methods were ranked as: ERNIE > Bert-CNN > Bert > Bert-RNN. When using Bert as the benchmark model, several deformation models showed applicable characteristics. Bert, Bert-CNN, and Bert-RNN were good at acquiring global features, local features, and processing variable-length inputs, respectively. ERNIE showed improved masking mechanism and corpus and therefore exhibited better performance. Finally, 124,196 usage method and 8935 quotation method sentences were obtained in batches. The proportions of method sentence in the literature showed increasing trends over the last 20 years. Thus, as literature with more method sentences accumulates, this study lays a foundation for knowledge extraction in the future.