Semantic Networks for Engineering Design: State of the Art and Future Directions

In the past two decades, there has been increasing use of semantic networks in engineering design for supporting various activities, such as knowledge extraction, prior art search, idea generation, and evaluation. Leveraging large-scale pre-trained graph knowledge databases to support engineering design-related natural language processing (NLP) tasks has attracted a growing interest in the engineering design research community. Therefore, this study aims to provide a survey of the state-of-the-art semantic networks for engineering design and propositions of future research to build and utilize large-scale semantic networks as knowledge bases to support engineering design research and practice. The survey shows that WordNet, ConceptNet, and other semantic networks, which contain common-sense knowledge or are trained on non-engineering data sources, are primarily used by engineering design researchers to develop methods and tools. Meanwhile, there are emerging efforts in constructing engineering and technical-contextualized semantic network databases, such as B-Link and TechNet, through retrieving data from technical data sources and employing unsupervised machine learning approaches. On this basis, we recommend six strategic future research directions to advance the development and uses of large-scale semantic networks for artificial intelligence applications in engineering design.