## 1 Introduction  
Work within the construction industry is allocated through construction contracts [1], which include information such as instructions, definitions, supporting statements, and contractual requirements that detail the standards and project specifications of the client [2]. A core component of construction contracts is reporting and information requirements, which require contractors to periodically submit various reports detailing different aspects of project progress to the client [3]. As construction projects and contracts are becoming increasingly complex, clients are demanding that contractors provide more information and reports on different project aspects [4, 5]. Reporting has quickly become a laborious procedure, with construction personnel spending as much as 40% of their time gathering field data, organizing and analyzing data, preparing reports, and verifying report accuracy [6]. Although a large administrative burden for contractors [7], the time and resources needed to complete reporting requirements--as well as the precise reporting requirements themselves--are often unknown and unaccounted for during the preliminary planning stages of a project. An integral component of project success, preliminary planning involves, among other activities, the selection of the project management team and the creation of the project documentation system. Consideration of specific reporting requirements during the preliminary planning stage ensures that (1) an adequate number of personnel is available to complete reporting requirements on time and within budget, (2) efficient project reporting systems are implemented, and (3) redundant and/or overlapping reporting requirements are addressed prior to the execution phase of a project. Contract documentation, however, remains an immature area of practice, with the identification of reporting requirements involving the manual reading, interpretation, and analysis of hundreds of unstructured textual contract pages to differentiate between statements related to requirements and other unimportant texts, such as instructions and definitions. Due to the time and effort involved, the manual extraction of reporting requirements is often not completed during the preliminary planning stages of a project, with project managers informally approximating reporting costs and resource requirements. Indeed, it has been reported that office-related processes, such as project reporting, continue to suffer from low reliability, where planned durations are often underestimated [8]. The poor estimation of project reporting costs and resource requirements during the preliminary planning stages of construction can result in a number of challenges for contractors [4; 9; 10; 11]. For example, an inadequate number of available project management personnel may result in project reports that are submitted late or with errors. In the case of certain types of contracts (e.g., cost-plus), reporting costs that exceed the preliminary estimate can result in disputes between the contractor and client. Furthermore, a lack of understanding of the reporting requirements in the preliminary stages of a project may prevent contractors from increasing reporting efficiency during the construction phase through the consolidation of redundant reporting requirements or by optimizing the composition of the project management team. As such, the ability to quickly, accurately, and automatically extract reporting requirements and predict associated costs is expected to have a notable impact on project performance [12]. Although text-mining techniques, such as information extraction, text classification, and other predictive analytics, have been used by researchers to develop requirement extraction models [4; 5; 13], existing models are not fully automated, do not provide high requirement extraction accuracy, and lack a cost-and-time prediction component.