An Approach to Translate Korea Building Act into Computer-Readable Form for Automated Design Assessment

This paper aims to describe an approach of implementation for an interpreter that translates the human natural language into a computer-readable form. Selected building permit-related sentences in Korea Building Act are within the scope of this paper. Among the various applications of BIM, the benefit of automated design assessment has been reported by some leading BIM challengers. The related regulations are usually defined in design guidelines, RFPs, Building Code, etc. The regulations are written in human-readable languages, and sometimes their implicit definitions hinder translating into the explicitly defined computer-readable forms. This paper focuses on the development of a translation process of converting Korea Building Act sentences into specific computer-readable forms such as a mid-level pseudo code and BERA (Building Environment Rule and Analysis) language. The scope of the research process and the overview of the approach to the translation from natural language sentences as follows; 1) Classification of the building objects and related properties from Korea Building Act sentences, 2) Classification of methods from predicate in sentences, 3) Parsing natural language sentence within logic rule-based process. In an actual implementation stage, this translation will be demonstrated by an actual GUI-based application.