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Unstructured texts dominate data in construction projects. With the achievements of natural language processing (NLP) techniques, mining unstructured text data for smart construction has become increasingly significant. To understand state-of-the-art NLP for smart construction, uncover related issues, and propose potential improvements, this paper presents a comprehensive review of bottom-level techniques and mainstream applications of NLP in the industry. In total, 124 journal articles published in the last two decades are reviewed. NLP involves five core steps supported by various techniques, e.g., syntactic parsing, heuristic rules, machine learning, and deep learning. NLP has been applied for information extraction and exchanging and many downstream applications to facilitate management and decision-making. The role of NLP in smart construction and current challenges for fully reaping its benefits are discussed, and four research directions are identified, i.e., improving relation extraction, realising knowledge base auto-development, integrating multi-modal information, and achieving an accuracy-efficiency trade-off by developing an NLP application framework. It is envisioned that outcomes of this paper can assist both researchers and industrial practitioners with appreciating the research and practice frontier of NLP for smart construction and soliciting the latest NLP techniques. • An in-depth review of natural language processing (NLP) for smart construction is conducted. • 124 journal articles published in 2000–2021 are manually reviewed. • Bottom-level NLP techniques are thoroughly introduced. • NLP is used to extract and exchange information and to support downstream applications. • The role of NLP in smart construction, current challenges, and future directions are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • A method to predict logical relationships between any pair of schedule activities with F1-Score of 88.3%. • A method to schedule a short list of input activities based on the learned logic. • Formalization of indirect logic dependencies between schedule activities. • A method for mining indirect dependencies from an input schedule. In construction, schedule mistakes causing delays beyond substantial completion dates cost contractors expensive liquidated damages. Hence, several industry guidelines, such as the DCMA's 14 point assessment, define schedule quality and offer systematic methods for ensuring it. These guidelines list "logic" as an essential control metric, and they require planners to ensure their schedules are free of missing or wrong logical dependencies. Checking the logic requires extensive construction domain knowledge, and planners perform it entirely manually as there are no available software solutions that support it. This paper offers a novel machine learning-based solution that learns construction scheduling domain knowledge from existing records completely automatically and applies it to validate the logic in input schedules achieving an F1 score of 88.3%. Furthermore, we tailor our method to use the learned knowledge to schedule a list of unordered activities. The details of the method, experimental results, benefits, and limitations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction projects face various constraints (e.g., materials and equipment). Constraint management approaches such as advanced working packaging (AWP) can remove constraints and ensure smooth work. However, due to inefficient information extraction, the prerequisite of AWP, i.e., identifying and modelling constraints, are performed manually. Efforts that integrate constraint information into project knowledge bases are also limited. This paper proposes a hybrid approach to automatically extract and integrate constraint information from texts. The approach combines a deep learning model with pre-defined rules. The model extracts constraint entities whereas rules created based on domain knowledge are used to establish relations between these entities. Extracted information is encoded into the original ontologies. The approach can extract both entities and relations with over 90% accuracy. The original ontologies can be successfully enriched and support semantic queries. The approach improves AWP by partially automating constraint identification and modelling as well as ontology development for information integration. • A deep-learning model is trained to extract constraints related entities from project documents • Domain knowledge is used to create rules to setup relations among extracted entities • Extracted entities and relations are encoded into domain ontologies to enrich its contents • The approach partially automates identification/modelling for advanced working packaging • The approach also partially automates ontology development [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]