Structuring occupational accident narratives for cross-sector safety analysis: Transferability of accident-process role classification

Aho Yapi, Pierre Latouche, Arnaud Guillin, Yan Bailly

Introduction: Occupational accident narratives describe work situations, unfavourable conditions, accident events, and consequences, but differences in terminology and reporting practices hinder systematic analysis across sectors and organisations. This study examined whether a model developed in one occupational sector could identify the same accident-process information in unseen sectors and reporting environments. Method: French accident narratives were segmented into factual units and expert-annotated as work situation, explicitly reported unfavourable condition, accident event or deviation, or reported consequence. Models were developed on 42,244 factual units from 6,040 construction-sector narratives and evaluated without retraining on metallurgy, chemistry-plastics, and an independently collected company corpus. We compared a TF-IDF-based lexical model, frozen pretrained text representations, and task-adapted pretrained models. Results: Average balanced accuracy was 75.0% for TF-IDF, 76.9% for frozen pretrained representations, and about 85.7% after task adaptation. Across repeated runs, leading adapted approaches showed similar overall performance, with no method…