Development of a knowledge Engineer for mechanism design based on natural language understanding

Methodologies have been developed and implemented in LISP to build a KNOWLEDGE ENGINEER module for an expert system DOMES (Design Of Mechanism by an Expert System), developed at the University of Rhode Island, for type synthesis of mechanisms. Specifically, artificial intelligence concepts and LISP programming techniques have been incorporated in this module to implement the following two activities: 1) analyzing and understanding design criteria supplied by human designers in the form of simple English sentences; 2) transforming these design criteria into LISP code and storing them in the knowledge base of DOMES. This KNOWLEDGE ENGINEER module enhances the capability and improves the performance of the expert system DOMES by providing an effective means for knowledge acquisition based on natural language understanding. The concepts and implementation techniques in developing this module are general and can also be utilized for other knowledge based systems