Aug 2026· Electronics· Vol 15, pp. 3462· 0 citations· 24 references
TL;DR
This paper proposes TMCAS, an efficient large language model-assisted topic modeling framework for civil aviation safety reports that achieves superior clustering and interpretability while substantially reducing inference cost compared with document-wise LLM baselines.
Abstract
Voluntary safety reports provide valuable information for identifying potential risks and improving safety management in civil aviation. However, these reports are often large in volume, unstructured in format, and rich in domain-specific terminology, making manual analysis costly, inefficient, and difficult to scale. To address these challenges, this paper proposes TMCAS, an efficient large language model-assisted topic modeling framework for civil aviation safety reports. The proposed framework combines domain-adapted text embeddings, density-based clustering, representative sampling, noise repair, and large language model-based topic generation. Specifically, a contrastive learning-based fine-tuning strategy is introduced to enhance the semantic representation of aviation safety texts. An HDBSCAN-based clustering and sampling mechanism is then designed to select representative reports and reduce the computational cost of large language model inference, while a noise-repair strategy is used to improve topic coverage. Finally, large language models are employed to generate interpretable sentence-level topic labels and descriptions. Experiments demonstrate that TMCAS achieves superior clustering and interpretability while substantially reducing inference cost compared with document-wise LLM baselines.
In high-risk industrial settings, leveraging large language models (LLMs) for automated accident analysis and generating safety reports has emerged as an efficient workflow. However, this approach is fundamentally constrained by the models’ inherent knowledge limitations, frequently resulting in analyses that lack domain-specific understanding and regulatory alignment.
To tackle this issue, we introduce SafeRAG, a multistage retrieval-augmented framework for safety report generation. Specifically, the framework uses an entity-centric approach that prompts the LLMs to internally generate domain-specific knowledge. Concurrently, it performs a hierarchical retrieval of external regulations relevant to the accident at topic, concept, and context levels. To obtain well-structured reports, we leverage prompt engineering, integrating internal and external knowledge. Furthermore, a domain-expert persona is also assigned to help LLMs analyze accidents from a specific perspective. To evaluate our approach, we construct a data set from 10,818 accident-description/report pairs collected from real-world industry reports. Experiments show that SafeRAG substantially outperforms baseline LLMs on metrics that include bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERTScore) and bidirectional auto-regressive transformers (BARTScore), demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
Qi Cao, Chiyu Zhang, Junxiong Ning et al.· SPE Journal· 0 citations
FlightLLM, a prior-guided semantic LLM-based approach for interpretable flight safety analysis that achieves competitive classification performance while generating direct and reasonable explanations for event causes is proposed.
Urban infrastructure systems increasingly depend on textual reports generated by citizens, inspection teams, maintenance units, emergency platforms, and smart city services. Accurate identification of critical risks in these reports is essential for enhancing urban resilience and enabling timely decision-making. Nevertheless, urban infrastructure risk classification is challenging due to the brevity, noise, domain specificity, and context dependence of these reports. This study introduces RAFE-XAI, a retrieval-augmented feature engineering and explainable natural language processing framework for urban infrastructure risk classification. The term retrieval-augmented is used here in a classification-oriented sense: retrieved reports are used to construct additional features and evidence, not to generate output text as in Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. The proposed framework incorporates semantic sentence embeddings, retrieval-based evidence, neighborhood-derived label distributions, domain-specific risk indicators, infrastructure asset cues, location indicators, and evidence-based explainability. The framework does not construct an explicit graph, adjacency matrix, graph neural network, or message-passing mechanism. Instead, retrieval is used to derive neighbor label-distribution features, which are combined with semantic embeddings and interpretable keyword, asset, and location indicators. To assess the effectiveness of this approach, UIR-Text, a semi-synthetic urban infrastructure risk dataset with scenario-level group splitting to mitigate data leakage, was constructed. Experimental results on UIR-Text show that fine-tuned DistilBERT achieves the strongest predictive performance, with Macro-F1 scores of 0.8278 for category classification, 0.9120 for binary critical-risk detection, and 0.3379 for four-level severity classification. Among the explainable feature-engineering models, RAFE-XAI with Random Forest achieves the strongest category classification performance, with Accuracy 0.8400, Macro-F1 0.8043, Weighted-F1 0.8444, and MCC 0.8062. These results suggest that fine-tuned transformers provide the highest predictive performance on this benchmark, while RAFE-XAI offers a transparent retrieval-augmented alternative that exposes retrieved evidence, neighbor label distributions, and domain cues. Four-level severity classification remains challenging, even with fine-tuned DistilBERT, indicating the need for richer impact-aware variables.
Abdulaziz Almaleh, Abdullah M. Alqahtani· Mathematics· 0 citations
Aircraft accident investigation reports contain important information regarding the chronology of events, findings, contributing factors, and safety recommendations that can be used to understand accident patterns. However, this information is generally presented in the form of unstructured text, making manual analysis less efficient. This research aims to apply BERTopic to identify latent themes in aviation accident investigation reports published by the National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT). A total of 182 investigation reports classified as Final Reports were processed through text extraction, corpus formation, and preprocessing, resulting in 172 documents used for topic modelling. BERTopic was implemented using sentence embedding, UMAP dimensionality reduction, HDBSCAN clustering, and c-TF-IDF-based topic representation. The modelling results yielded ten main topics reflecting various aspects of aviation safety, including technical, operational, and human factors. Evaluation showed that BERTopic achieved a topic coherence (Cv) value of 0.6111 and generated more specific keywords compared to Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The research results indicate that BERTopic is capable of effectively extracting latent themes from KNKT investigation reports and has the potential to support the analysis of aviation accident patterns and serve as a foundation for the development of domain knowledge-based research in the field of aviation safety.
This study contributes to the field by elucidating the capabilities and limitations of LLMs and RAG in urban studies, highlighting that while text-only retrieval is insufficient for context-rich analysis, future advancements in spatially aware hybrid retrieval offer a promising pathway forward.
Xinyu Wang· Transactions in Urban Data,...· 0 citations
Large language models (LLMs) are built on the classic Transformer architecture and have become a core driving force for the rapid development of modern artificial intelligence. This paper presents a systematic review of LLMs, elaborating on their fundamental working principles, mainstream open-source models, effective lightweight optimization methods, retrieval-augmented generation frameworks and key human-value-aligned technologies. Nowadays, LLMs have been widely applied in practice. Typical scenarios include intelligent text generation, professional knowledge-based question answering and automated code generation, delivering remarkable value to both industries and academia. However, their large-scale industrial application is still restricted by multiple challenges. The major issues involve content hallucination, poor model interpretability, excessive computing resource consumption, potential ethical risks and unsatisfactory multimodal integration capability. This paper also forecasts the future development directions of LLMs, such as lightweight deployment on edge devices, safety-focused human value alignment, in-depth cross-modal fusion and customized large models for vertical industries. Additionally, it collects a number of representative cases, which can offer solid references and practical guidance for relevant researchers and engineering practitioners to carry out further studies.