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Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0890060407070138How to cite this article: IVEY CHIU and L.H. SHU (2007). Biomimetic design through natural language analysis to facilitate cross-domain information retrieval. AbstractBiomimetic, 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 "defend." Defend is not an obvious keyword to most engineers for this problem, nor are the words defend and "clean0remove" directly related within lexical references. However, previous work showed that biological phenomena retrieved by the keyword defend provided useful stimuli and produced successful concepts for the clean0remove problem. In this paper, we describe a method to systematically bridge the disparate biology and engineering domains using natural language analysis. For the clean0remove example, we were able to algorithmically generate several biologically meaningful keywords, including defend, that are not obviously related to the engineering problem. We developed a method to organize and rank the set of biologically meaningful keywords identified, and confirmed that we could achieve similar results for two other examples in encapsulation and microassembly. Although we specifically address cross-domain information retrieval from biology, the bridging process presented in this paper is not limited to biology, and can be used for any other domain given the availability of appropriate domain-specific knowledge sources and references.

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Biology is recognized as an excellent source of analogies and stimuli for engineering design. Previous work focused on the systematic identification of relevant biological analogies by searching for instances of functional keywords in biological information in natural-language format. This past work revealed that engineering keywords could not always be used to identify the most relevant biological analogies as the vocabularies between biology and engineering are sufficiently distinct. Therefore, a retrieval algorithm was developed to identify potential biologically meaningful keywords that are more effective in searching biological text than corresponding engineering keywords. In our current work, we applied and refined the retrieval algorithm to translate functional terms of the functional basis into biologically meaningful keywords. The functional basis is widely accepted as a standardized representation of engineering product functionality. Therefore, our keywords could serve as a thesaurus for engineers to find biological analogies relevant to their design problems. We also describe specific semantic relationships that can be used to identify biologically meaningful keywords in excerpts describing biological phenomena. These semantic relations were applied as criteria to identify the most useful biologically meaningful keywords. Through a preliminary validation experiment, we observed that different translators were able to apply the criteria to identify biologically meaningful keywords with a high degree of agreement to those identified by the authors. In addition, we describe how fourth-year undergraduate mechanical engineering students used the biologically meaningful keywords to develop concepts for their design projects.