Function-based patent retrieval for concept design

In concept design, function of system is usually described with a verb and a noun. The verb describes the operation that the system applies on the object which is represented by the noun. The functional verbs are commonly expanded with its synonyms and antonyms, troponyms and hypernyms to use as design stimuli in engineering problems. To reuse previous design resolution, this paper presents a function based patent retrieval approach in which the initial keywords are represented as “verb + noun”, and then the verbs and nouns are automatically expanded into verb set and noun set using Functional Basis and WordNet. The verb set is not only used as design stimuli, but also used as keywords for patent retrieval. The noun set is used to filter retrieval results. The experiment results indicate that the proposed approach can retrieve more functional relevant patents and facilitate cross-domain patent retrieval.