An Application of Semantic Distance between Short Texts to Inventive Design

The gradual development of inventive design techniques makes that numerous knowledge sources are available for experts to solve inventive problems in different technical and non-technical fields. Real-world problems are established in terms of parameters that are inherent to the artefact being developed, but inventive design techniques use generalized engineering parameters to propose solutions to the problem. An abstraction effort needs to be provided to choose, then, the best generalized parameter. In this paper, we firstly present the inventive principles ontology we have established as a support for our approach. According to this ontology, we propose a method to calculate the semantic distance between short texts and use it to fill the semantic gap between the parameter and the generalized one, to facilitate the use of inventive design techniques.