Applications of natural language processing in construction

In the construction industry under “Industry 4.0”, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been widely used to process and analyze text data to achieve construction intelligence. However, there lacks a comprehensive review of NLP application in construction-related areas, raising bar of research entry and setting obstacles for the rapid development in this fields. Ninety one NLP-related research articles in construction-related fields were retrieved to conduct a scientometric analysis using CiteSpace and VOSViewer, and summarized from the perspectives of anchordatasets/data sources, technologies/tools, and applications and progress. The results show that data isolation causing non-reproducibility of research is one of the severe problems to be solved. Besides, pure NLP application studies will no longer meet the future industry development needs and more cross-modal interdisciplinary research based on the end-to-end pre-trained neural network model framework is needed. This study helps readers gain an in-depth understanding of the NLP application and development in construction. [Display omitted] •91 NLP-related research articles (2000−2020) from Scopus and WOS were collected.•A systematic scientometric analysis was conducted using the tools of CiteSpace and VOSViewer.•A comprehensive review of the collected articles was carried out from three aspects.•The current challenges, possible solutions, and future research trends were critically discussed.