A Method of Constructing Marine Oil Spill Scenarios from Flat Text Based on Semantic Analysis

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Apr 13;17(8):2659. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17082659.

Abstract

Constructed emergency response scenarios provide a basis for decision makers to make management decisions, and the development of such scenarios considers earlier historical cases. Over the decades, the development of emergency response scenarios has mainly implemented the elements of historic cases to describe the grade and influence of an accident. This paper focuses on scenario construction and proposes a corresponding framework based on natural language processing (NLP) using text reports of marine oil spill accidents. For each accident, the original textual reports are first divided into sentence sets corresponding to the temporal evolution. Each sentence set is regarded as a textual description of a marine oil spill scenario. A method is proposed in this paper, based on parsing, named entity recognition (NER) and open information extraction (OpenIE) to process the relation triples that are extracted from the sentence sets. Finally, the relation triples are semantically clustered into different marine oil spill domains to construct scenarios. The research results are validated and indicate that the proposed scenario construction framework can be effectively used in practical applications.

Keywords: marine oil spill; natural language processing; scenario construction; semantic clustering.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Accidents
  • Petroleum Pollution*
  • Semantics