An NLP framework for extracting causes, consequences, and hazards from occurrence reports to validate a HAZOP study

A substantial amount of effort and resource is applied to the design of aircraft systems to reduce risk to life and improve safety. This is often applied through a variety of safety assessment methods, one of which being Hazard and Operability (HAZOP) Studies. Once an air system is in-service, it is common for flight data to be collected and analysed to validate the original safety assessment. However, the operator of the air system generates and stores a substantial amount of safety knowledge within free-text occurrence reports. These allow maintainers and aircrew to report occurrences, often describing hazards and associated detail revealing consequences and causes. A lack of resource means it is difficult for safety professionals to manually review these occurrences and although occurrences are classified against a set taxonomy (e.g., birdstrike, technical failure) this lacks the granularity to apply to a specific safety analysis. To resolve this, the paper presents the development of a novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) framework for extracting causes, consequences, and hazards from free-text occurrence reports in order to validate and inform an aircraft sub-system HAZOP study. Specifically using a combination of rule-based phrase matching with a spaCy Named Entity Recognition (NER) model. It is suggested that the framework could form a continual improvement process whereby the findings drive updates to the HAZOP, in turn updating the rules and model, therefore improving accuracy and hazard identification over time.Whitworth Senior Scholarship Award: Institution of Mechanical Engineers. QinetiQ. Royal Air Force

Antisocial behavior identification from Twitter feeds using traditional machine learning algorithms and deep learning

Antisocial behavior (ASB) is one of the ten personality disorders included in ‘The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and falls in the same cluster as Borderline Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It is a prevalent pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others. Online antisocial behavior is a social problem and a public health threat. An act of ASB might be fun for a perpetrator; however, it can drive a victim into depression, self-confinement, low self-esteem, anxiety, anger, and suicidal ideation. Online platforms such as Twitter and Reddit can sometimes become breeding grounds for such behavior by allowing people suffering from ASB disorder to manifest their behavior online freely. In this paper, we propose a proactive approach based on natural language processing and deep learning that can enable online platforms to actively look for the signs of antisocial behavior and intervene before it gets out of control. By actively searching for such behavior, social media sites can prevent dire situations leading to someone committing suicide