Buildings, Vol. 16, Pages 2770: Domain-Specific Named Entity Recognition from Chinese Building Fire Protection Design Codes for Automated Compliance Checking

Buildings, Vol. 16, Pages 2770: Domain-Specific Named Entity Recognition from Chinese Building Fire Protection Design Codes for Automated Compliance Checking

Buildings doi: 10.3390/buildings16142770

Authors:
Lu Gao
Dejun Qiao
Hong Zhang
Liang Zhao

Automated compliance checking for building fire protection design requires accurate extraction of domain-specific entities from technical code provisions. However, building fire protection codes contain highly specialized terminology, hierarchical clause structures, and complex regulatory semantics, which make manual information extraction time-consuming and error-prone. This study develops a domain-specific named entity recognition approach for Chinese building fire protection design codes. An expert-annotated dataset was constructed from five representative codes, containing 2748 annotated provisions and 13,877 entity mentions across nine entity categories. A RoBERTa-BiLSTM-CRF model was then developed to capture contextual semantic representations, bidirectional sequence dependencies, and label-transition constraints. Results suggest that the proposed model achieves 88.34%, 88.31%, and 88.32% for precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively. The extracted entities can be organized into structured and traceable records, providing a foundation for downstream building fire protection knowledge management and automated compliance checking.