Natural language processing of incident and accident reports : application to risk management in civil aviation

This thesis describes the applications of natural language processing (NLP) to industrial risk management. We focus on the domain of civil aviation, where incident reporting and accident investigations produce vast amounts of information, mostly in the form of textual accounts of abnormal events, and where efficient access to the information contained in the reports is required. We start by drawing a panorama of the different types of data produced in this particular domain. We analyse the documents themselves, how they are stored and organised as well as how they are used within the community. We show that the current storage and organisation paradigms are not well adapted to the data analysis requirements, and we identify the problematic areas, for which NLP technologies are part of the solution. Specifically addressing the needs of aviation safety professionals, two initial solutions are implemented: automatic classification for assisting in the coding of reports within existing taxonomies and a system based on textual similarity for exploring collections of reports. Based on the observation of real-world tool usage and on user feedback, we propose different methods and approaches for processing incident and accident reports and comprehensively discuss how NLP can be applied within the safety information processing framework of a high-risk sector. By deploying and evaluating certain approaches, we show how elusive aspects related to the variability and multidimensionality of language can be addressed in a practical manner and we propose bottom-up methods for managing the overabundance of textual feedback data