A Hybrid Semantic Networks Construction Framework for Engineering Design

This paper proposes a novel framework for building semantic networks from a seed design statement using Recursive Object Modeling (ROM), Word2Vec language modeling, and vector semantic-based method. Semantic Scholar API was used to retrieve abstracts of scientific papers to build ROM-based Semantic Networks to address the design problem implied in the seed design statement, following Environment Analysis from Environment-Based Design (EBD) methodology. The proposed framework was applied to construct the semantic network for a project to design aircraft braking systems, which demonstrates the framework's efficiency. The presented research makes two major contributions: a ROM-based phrase extractor and a domain-specific language model, which is trained on the automatically collected literature abstracts. Using a manually created and assessed truth set containing 100 pairs of abstract-key phrases, the phrase extractor was evaluated by benchmarking it with two existing off-the-shelf key phrase extraction algorithms: TextRank and Rake. The ROM-based phrase extractor extracted most key phrases from target domains and showed higher precision, recall, and F-1 scores than other methods. Meanwhile, the trained project-specific language model was evaluated using the NASA thesaurus. We randomly sampled 457 pairs of connected domain-specific terms related to aircraft braking and landing knowledge. Our Skip-gram model was compared with Google's pre-trained word2vec model and a baseline word2vec model. The results demonstrated that our language model could detect the most pairs of concepts from the NASA thesaurus. The generated semantic network can be applied to design information retrieval, computer-aided design idea generation, cross-domain communication support system, and designer training tool.