NLP Safety Incident Analysis with Industry-Specific Dictionaries

Resolve Bottlenecks,
Find Innovative Solutions
Generate Solutions

Solution Overview

Problem

Existing technologies face challenges in accurately managing and analyzing safety incident data due to its unique characteristics, structure, and lexicography across different industries, leading to inaccurate results and the need for manual curation, which is impractical due to volume and legal concerns.

Innovation Solution

A system utilizing industry-specific filtering capabilities, custom dictionaries, and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze safety incident data, providing real-time alerts and risk assessments, and enabling automated preprocessing and analysis to improve accuracy and completeness of analytical results.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Measurement precision

If conventional NLP approaches are used to process safety incident data, then general processing capability is provided, but accuracy deteriorates due to industry-specific characteristics and varying data structures

Engineering Contradiction:
ImproveNLP processing accuracyVSAvoidIndustry-specific adaptation
Core Design Contradiction:
Measurement precisionVSAdaptability or versatility

Solution Approach 1:

The system implements industry-specific NLP models tailored to different sectors (manufacturing, retail, construction, healthcare) with customized lexicons, data structure expectations, and processing parameters. Each industry model is trained on domain-specific incident data to capture unique characteristics, terminology, and reporting formats, thereby improving processing accuracy for each specific context while maintaining overall system versatility.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #3Local quality

Solution Approach 2:

The system dynamically adjusts NLP processing parameters based on industry type and data source characteristics. This includes modifying tokenization strategies, stopping word lists, entity recognition thresholds, and classification criteria to match the specific parameters of each industry's incident data, thereby optimizing accuracy without requiring complete separate systems for each domain.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #35Parameter changes

2Measurement precision

If manual curation and review of event data are performed, then data quality is improved, but productivity deteriorates due to volume and legal concerns

Engineering Contradiction:
ImproveData curation accuracyVSAvoidEvent data processing throughput
Core Design Contradiction:
Measurement precisionVSProductivity

Solution Approach 1:

The system implements automated self-curation through machine learning models that automatically classify, validate, and annotate incident data without human intervention. The NLP system performs entity extraction, incident classification, severity assessment, and data normalization autonomously, enabling high-volume processing while maintaining consistent quality standards and eliminating legal privacy concerns associated with human reviewers accessing sensitive incident details.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #25Self-service

Solution Approach 2:

The system incorporates feedback loops where automated processing results are continuously evaluated and used to refine model performance. Quality metrics are tracked and fed back into the training process, allowing the system to self-improve accuracy over time while maintaining automated high-speed processing capability.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #23Feedback

3Adaptability or versatility

If custom implementation of APIs or interfaces is performed for each data source, then data integration completeness is improved, but device complexity deteriorates

Engineering Contradiction:
ImproveData source compatibilityVSAvoidInterface implementation complexity
Core Design Contradiction:
Adaptability or versatilityVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The system implements a universal NLP processing platform that can handle multiple data sources and formats through a single standardized interface. The architecture uses format-agnostic processing pipelines that automatically detect and adapt to incoming data structures, eliminating the need for custom API implementations for each source while maintaining comprehensive data integration capability across manufacturing, retail, construction, and healthcare sectors.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #6Universality (Multi-functionality)

Solution Approach 2:

The system introduces an intermediary layer of standardized data normalization and preprocessing that sits between diverse data sources and the core NLP processing engine. This mediator converts various input formats into a unified internal representation, allowing the system to integrate multiple data sources without requiring custom interfaces for each one, thereby reducing overall system complexity.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #24Intermediary (Mediator)

Data Source

PatentUS12223272B2System for natural language processing of safety incident data
Publication Date: 2025.02.11 BENCHMARK DIGITAL PARTNERS LLC
  • US12223272B2 patent drawing
  • US12223272B2 patent drawing
  • US12223272B2 patent drawing

AI summary

An incident report management system is configured to receive and analyze incident reports relating to workplace accidents and injuries. A natural language processing function utilizes word dictionaries of varying type and scope to reduce an incident description to a set of core components that are far smaller than the input text while also preserving important aspects of the input text. The reduced core component set may be analyzed for meaning, compared to large volumes of historic incident reports, and otherwise processed more quickly and more efficiently whether by an expert function or AI function. In this manner, the system is able to provide real-time feedback during submission of incidents to improve quality and completeness, and after submission of incidents to notify users of serious incidents, provide dashboard analytics, and identify underlying and undiscovered risks in the workplace.