A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions sorts the free-text descriptions in legacy bore logs into rock classes and reports what the entries for unrecovered intervals turn out to contain.
A text classifier is asked what to do with 2,811 bore-log entries recording that no rock was recovered
The School of Underlying Conditions has for some time concerned itself with the parts of a borehole that never reached the surface. With What the Driller Wrote Instead: Text classification of 38,416 bore-log intervals, 2,811 of which describe nothing recovered, a research poster released today, that concern passes from the core tray to the page of the log.
The poster is by Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Associate Professor and Lead, Basement Relations Group, with Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, and Edda Nwafor, Doctoral Candidate, both of the School of Continuous Improvement.
I supplied the logs and my colleagues supplied the arithmetic. Each of us has since taken an interest in the other’s half, which I understand is how these arrangements are intended to go.
— Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Associate Professor and Lead, Basement Relations Group
Legacy descriptions from one regional survey archive were coupled to a text-classification capability and sorted into nine classes of rock. The entries recording no recovery were then handled three ways and the results set side by side. A classifier shown only the words of such an entry named the rock above and below it correctly for 58 per cent of them, against 29 per cent for the commonest guess. Drillers who wrote of a cavity were mostly in limestone; those who wrote that the hole had washed out were mostly in sand or clay. Entries left blank gave the classifier nothing, and it returned as much.
The University notes with some satisfaction that an earth sciences school and a classification method have been introduced and appear to be getting on. Dr Nwosu said the method had been “asked an unfamiliar question and answered at its usual length”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vkgxes.