Railway accident entity extraction method based on accident phase classification and mutual learning

Purpose This study aims to enhance the accuracy of key entity extraction from railway accident report texts and address challenges such as complex domain-specific semantics, data sparsity and strong inter-sentence semantic dependencies. A robust entity extraction method tailored for accident texts is proposed. Design/methodology/approach This method is implemented through a dual-branch multi-task mutual learning model named R-MLP, which jointly performs entity recognition and accident phase classification. The model leverages a shared BERT encoder to extract contextual features and incorporates a sentence span indexing module to align feature granularity. A cross-task mutual learning mechanism is also introduced to strengthen semantic representation. Findings R-MLP effectively mitigates the impact of semantic complexity and data sparsity in domain entities and enhances the model's ability to capture inter-sentence semantic dependencies. Experimental results show that R-MLP achieves a maximum F1-score of 0.736 in extracting six types of key railway accident entities, significantly outperforming baseline models such as RoBERTa and MacBERT. Originality/value This demonstrates the proposed method's superior generalization and accuracy in domain-specific entity extraction tasks, confirming its effectiveness and practical value.