Natural Language Processing for Content Analysis of Communication in Collaborative Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We address the problem of content analysis in text-based engineering design communication. Existing methods to characterize communication content in engineering design are manual or qualitative, which is tedious for large datasets. We formulate the characterization of communication messages as an intent classification task. We identify two intents — Intent 1 captures the presence and flow of information, Intent 2 captures specific topics about design parameters and objectives. We compare the predictive accuracy of convolutional LSTM, character-based convolutional LSTM, XLNet, and BERT models for the intent classification task. The results of our comparison show that the XL-Net model predicts Intents 1 and 2 with 88% and 81% accuracy, respectively, on text data collected from 40 teams in a design experiment with university students. We analyze the differences in communication patterns between high- and low-performing teams. Time-series studies show that high-performing teams have more responsive communication and a higher consistency of information exchange.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".