Application of Domain-specific Thesaurus to Construction Documents based on Flow Margin of Semantic Similarity

Large Language Models (LLMs) still encounter challenges in comprehending domain-specific expressions within construction documents. Analogous to humans acquiring unfamiliar expressions from dictionaries, language models could assimilate domain-specific expressions through the use of a thesaurus. Numerous prior studies have developed construction thesauri; however, a practical issue arises in effectively leveraging these resources for instructing language models. Given that the thesaurus primarily outlines relationships between terms without indicating their relative importance, language models may struggle in discerning which terms to retain or replace. This research aims to establish a robust framework for guiding language models using the information from the thesaurus. For instance, a term would be associated with a list of similar terms while also being included in the lists of other related terms. The relative significance among terms could be ascertained by employing similarity scores normalized according to relevance ranks. Consequently, a term exhibiting a positive margin of normalized similarity scores (termed a pivot term) could semantically replace other related terms, thereby enabling LLMs to comprehend domain-specific terms through these pivotal terms. The outcome of this research presents a practical methodology for utilizing domain-specific thesauri to train LLMs and analyze construction documents. Ongoing evaluation involves validating the accuracy of the thesaurus-applied LLM (e.g., S-BERT) in identifying similarities within construction specification provisions. This outcome holds potential for the construction industry by enhancing LLMs' understanding of construction documents and subsequently improving text mining performance and project management efficiency.