Increasing the Accessibility of Causal Domain Knowledge via Causal Information Extraction Methods: A Case Study in the Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry

Causal domain knowledge is commonly documented using natural language either in unstructured or semi-structured forms. This study aims to increase the usability of causal domain knowledge in industrial documents by transforming the information into a more structured format. The paper presents our wo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Houssam Razouk, Leonie Benischke, Daniel Gärber, Roman Kern
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-02-01
Series:Applied Sciences
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/15/5/2573
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Summary:Causal domain knowledge is commonly documented using natural language either in unstructured or semi-structured forms. This study aims to increase the usability of causal domain knowledge in industrial documents by transforming the information into a more structured format. The paper presents our work on developing automated methods for causal information extraction from real-world industrial documents in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, including presentation slides and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) documents. Specifically, we evaluate two types of causal information extraction methods: single-stage sequence tagging (SST) and multi-stage sequence tagging (MST). The presented case study showcases that the proposed MST methods for extracting causal information from industrial documents are suitable for practical applications, especially for semi-structured documents such as FMEAs, with a 93% F1 score. Additionally, the study shows that extracting causal information from presentation slides is more challenging. The study highlights the importance of choosing a language model that is more aligned with the domain and in-domain pre-training.
ISSN:2076-3417