Beyond buzzwords: NLP reveals common threads in sustainable and circular construction discourse

Area of Science:

• Construction Management
• Environmental Science
• Computer Science

Background:

• The terms 'circular economy' and 'sustainability' are increasingly used in academic literature, leading to ambiguity.
• Manual analysis of extensive research on these topics is time-consuming and challenging.
• Distinguishing between circular and sustainable construction is difficult due to overlapping concepts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare and analyze literature on sustainable and circular construction using natural language processing (NLP).
• To elucidate the similarities and overlaps between circular and sustainable construction within the construction industry.
• To provide a methodological framework for future data-driven investigations in construction literature.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of 480 academic articles on circular economy and sustainability in construction.
• Application of three NLP techniques: TextRank, term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), and semantic annotation (Wikifier).
• Extraction of key structural relationships, significant terms, and contextual understanding from the literature corpus.

Main Results:

• Circular construction is identified as more specific and practical, focusing on resource efficiency, waste management, and operational aspects like recycling.
• Sustainable construction is found to have a broader, more holistic scope, encompassing urban planning, community development, and long-term environmental impacts.
• NLP methods successfully distinguished between the distinct yet related concepts of circular and sustainable construction.

Conclusions:

• NLP techniques offer a systematic approach to disentangle closely related concepts in scientific literature.
• Clarifying the distinctions between circular and sustainable construction enhances understanding for policymakers and practitioners.
• This research provides a replicable framework for analyzing complex terminology in the construction sector.