Natural Language Processing for Aviation Safety: Predicting Injury Levels from Incident Reports in Australia

This study investigates the application of advanced deep learning models for the classification of aviation safety incidents, focusing on four models: Simple Recurrent Neural Network (sRNN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM), and DistilBERT. The models were evaluated based on key performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. DistilBERT achieved perfect performance with an accuracy of 1.00 across all metrics, while BLSTM demonstrated the highest performance among the deep learning models, with an accuracy of 0.9896, followed by GRU (0.9893) and sRNN (0.9887). Class-wise evaluations revealed that DistilBERT excelled across all injury categories, with BLSTM outperforming the other deep learning models, particularly in detecting fatal injuries, achieving a precision of 0.8684 and an F1-score of 0.7952. The study also addressed the challenges of class imbalance by applying class weighting, although the use of more sophisticated techniques, such as focal loss, is recommended for future work. This research highlights the potential of transformer-based models for aviation safety classification and provides a foundation for future research to improve model interpretability and generalizability across diverse datasets. These findings contribute to the growing body of research on applying deep learning techniques to aviation safety and underscore opportunities for further exploration in NLP-driven risk assessment and incident classification.