Incident detection and classification in renewable energy news using pre-trained language models on deep neural networks

Abstract

The surge of renewable energy systems can lead to increasing incidents that negatively impact economics and society, rendering incident detection paramount to understand the mechanism and range of those impacts. In this paper, a deep learning framework is proposed to detect renewable energy incidents from news articles containing accidents in various renewable energy systems. The pre-trained language models like Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and word2vec are utilized to represent textual inputs, which are trained by the Text Convolutional Neural Networks (TCNNs) and Text Recurrent Neural Networks. Two types of classifiers for incident detection are trained and tested in this paper, one is a binary classifier for detecting the existence of an incident, the other is a multi-label classifier for identifying different incident attributes such as causal-effects and consequences, etc. The proposed incident detection framework is implemented on a hand-annotated dataset with 5 190 records. The results show that the proposed framework performs well on both the incident existence detection task (F1-score 91.4%) and the incident attributes identification task (micro F1-score 81.7%). It is also shown that the BERT-based TCNNs are effective and robust in detecting renewable energy incidents from large-scale textual materials.