Semantic Reasoning of Product Biologically Inspired Design Based on BERT

Shijian Luo,Ping Shan,Fei Zheng,Liuyu Wang,Ze Bian

doi:10.3390/app112412082

Abstract

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.

Highlights

The Biologically inspired design (BID) strategy can be divided into a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach
In the bottom-up approach, designers start from biology to find suitable design objects
When inferring from the target domain product to the source domain organism, the subjects’ thinking is more open. This phenomenon could be explained by early-stage uncertainties in factors such as the product’s form, material, affective perception, and so on, causing the learner to pick less-educated guesses than it does under the normal circumstance

Summary

Introduction

People get inspiration from one domain and apply it to another domain, which is called analogy [1]. Inspired design (BID) takes biology as the source domain, and engineering, architecture, and industrial products can be target domains [2,3]. BID is a biologically inspired design in which the target domain is the product appearance. The BID strategy can be divided into a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach. In the top-down approach [4], there is always a well-defined problem, and designers search for analogous solutions in nature to solve it. In the bottom-up approach, designers start from biology to find suitable design objects

Methods

Results

Conclusion