Semantic Reasoning of Product Biologically Inspired Design Based on BERT

• Published in: Applied sciences Vol. 11; no. 24; p. 12082
• Main Authors: Bian, Ze, Luo, Shijian, Zheng, Fei, Wang, Liuyu, Shan, Ping
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.12.2021
• Subjects: Aircraft; biologically inspired design; Biology; bionic reasoning; Bionics; Cognition & reasoning; Design; Experiments; Graduate students; Industrial design; Keywords; Language; Morphology; Natural language; Organisms; Product design; Reasoning; Search methods; semantic matching; Semantics; Sentences
• ISSN: 2076-3417; 2076-3417
• DOI: 10.3390/app112412082

Bionic reasoning is a significant process in product biologically inspired design (BID), in which designers search for creatures and products that are matched for design. Several studies have tried to assist designers in bionic reasoning, but there are still limits. Designers’ bionic reasoning thinking in product BID is vague, and there is a lack of fuzzy semantic search methods at the sentence level. This study tries to assist designers’ bionic semantic reasoning in product BID. First, experiments were conducted to determine the designer’s bionic reasoning thinking in top-down and bottom-up processes. Bionic mapping relationships, including affective perception, form, function, material, and environment, were obtained. Second, the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) pretraining model was used to calculate the semantic similarity of product description sentences and biological sentences so that designers could choose the high-ranked results to finish bionic reasoning. Finally, we used a product BID example to show the bionic semantic reasoning process and verify the feasibility of the method.