Exploring the Co-Evolutionary Dynamics Between Scientific Findings and Industrial Innovations in Tunnel Construction Safety: A 22-Year Empirical Analysis

The interaction between safety-related scientific findings and industrial innovation is of great benefit in improving safety management during the tunnel construction. However, few studies have aimed to investigate the co-evolution between scientific knowledge and technological development in underground project safety, where substantial lexical heterogeneity exists in the cross-domain corpora. To address this research gap, this study proposes an integrated framework combining a novel natural language processing method with temporal econometrics. A cross-domain corpus comprising 6404 Web of Science (WoS) publications and 20,932 high-quality patent documents over a 22-year period (2004–2026) is collected in the field of underground project safety. Then, the dense semantic encoder bge-large-en-v1.5 is adopted to map the textual dataset onto a standardized high-dimensional vector space. The trajectories of quarterly safety-related science-technology semantic overlay are obtained, and then the Vector Autoregressive (VAR) method is applied to the time series stabilized via log-differencing to measure the temporal interaction patterns among the scientific activity, technological innovation, and semantic alignment. Empirical results show that the semantic overlay metric stabilized at a plateau ranging from 0.91 to 0.93. Moreover, a temporal permutation benchmark indicates that part of this similarity results from the shared engineering domain between the two datasets. The impulse response analysis based on a VAR model reveals the temporal fluctuations and dynamic adjustment among scientific activity, technological innovation, and semantic alignment rather than a unidirectional transmission pathway. In addition, the keyword analysis based on normalized document frequency exhibits a divergence in priorities between scientific research and patent-based innovation, while the shared keywords indicate both domains pay great attention to primary risks, such as water inrush and rock instability. These empirical data-driven discoveries provide insights into the science-technology co-evolution in tunnel construction safety. The integrated framework offers methodological support for monitoring knowledge alignment and developing proactive safety management strategies for the sustainable development of underground infrastructure.