A Method for Facilitating Inventive Design Based on Semantic Similarity and Case-Based Reasoning

While TRIZ is increasingly developing both in research and education, new users always encounter difficulties in their first attempts to practice it. In such situation, Altshuller's original matrix often appears as an “easy-to-begin- with” tool. However, while not being representative of what TRIZ really is, it continues to seduce new users, teachers and trainers. Several approaches to automate the use of the contradiction matrix have been proposed in literature, and researches on the automatic match between specific parameters of the artefact being considered and Altshuller's generalized parameters remains a topic of interest. In this paper, we propose a way to automate the proposal of equivalencies between a specific parameter and a generic parameter from the matrix. This method calculates the semantic distance between short texts, and uses it to fill the semantic gap between the specific parameters of the artefact and the generalized ones. Case-based reasoning is also used to improve the whole accuracy of the method.