In the Australian construction industry, effective supply chain risk management (SCRM) is critical due to its complex networks and susceptibility to various risks. This study explores the application of transformer models like BERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, ALBERT, and ELECTRA for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in this context. Utilizing these models, we analyzed news articles to identify and classify entities related to supply chain risks, providing insights into the vulnerabilities within this sector. Among the evaluated models, RoBERTa achieved the highest average F1 score of 0.8580, demonstrating its superior balance in precision and recall for NER in the Australian construction supply chain context. Our findings highlight the potential of NLP-driven solutions to revolutionize SCRM, particularly in geo-specific settings.

Recommender systems have seen wide adoption in different domains. The motive of such systems has evolved from providing generic recommendations in the past to providing customized and user-focused recommendations. To achieve this aim, the complexity and sophistication of the underlying techniques such systems use have evolved. Current recommender systems use advanced Artificial Intelligence techniques to provide intelligent recommendations and adapt their future workings to the user's interest and requirements. One such technique currently being used in the literature to achieve this aim is Reinforcement Learning. However, a drawback of this technique is that it is data intensive and needs to be trained on data that represent different scenarios to ensure that the recommended output in a given scenario is accurate. In this paper, we present an approach, namely Reinforcement Learning-based News Recommendation System (RL-NRS), to address this drawback in the domain of news recommendation. We explain the different stages of RL-NRS in detail and compare its performance with news articles recommended by Google for a particular search term.