Biomimetic design through natural language analysis to facilitate cross-domain information retrieval

Biomimetic, or biologically inspired, design uses analogous biological phenomena to develop solutions for engineering problems. Several instances of biomimetic design result from personal observations of biological phenomena. However, many engineers’ knowledge of biology may be limited, thus reducing the potential of biologically inspired solutions. Our approach to biomimetic design takes advantage of the large amount of biological knowledge already available in books, journals, and so forth, by performing keyword searches on these existing natural-language sources. Because of the ambiguity and imprecision of natural language, challenges inherent to natural language processing were encountered. One challenge of retrieving relevant cross-domain information involves differences in domain vocabularies, or lexicons. A keyword meaningful to biologists may not occur to engineers. For an example problem that involved cleaning, that is, removing dirt, a biochemist suggested the keyword “d...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: AIEDAM
• Authors: Ivey Chiu, L. H. Shu
• Keywords: AIEDAM 2007, Biological Phenomena, Biomimetic Design, Natural Language