Towards the extraction of semantic relations in design with natural language processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been extensively applied in design, particularly for analyzing technical documents like patents and scientific papers to identify entities such as functions, technical feature, and problems. However, there has been less focus on understanding semantic relations within literature, and a comprehensive definition of what constitutes a relation is still lacking. In this paper, we define relation in the context of design and the fundamental concepts linked to it. Subsequently, we introduce a framework for employing NLP to extract relations relevant to design.