Requirement Text Detection from Contract Packages to Support Project Definition Determination

Abstract

Project requirements are wishes and expectations of the client toward the design, construction, and other project management processes. The project definition is typically specified in a contract package including a contract document and many other related documents such as drawings, specifications, and government codes. Project definition determination is critical to the success of a project. Due to the lack of efficient tools for requirement processing, the current practices regarding project scoping still heavily rely on a manual basis which is tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone. This study aims to fill that gap by developing an automated method for identifying requirement texts from contractual documents. The study employed Naive Bayes to train a classification model that can be used to separate requirement statements from non-requirement statements. An experiment was conducted on a manually labeled dataset of 1191 statements. The results revealed that the developed requirement detection model achieves a promising accuracy of over 90%.