Retrieval augmented generation using engineering design knowledge

Aiming to support Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in the design process, we present a method to identify explicit, engineering design facts – {head entity:: relationship:: tail entity} from patented artefact descriptions. Given a sentence with a pair of entities (selected from noun phrases) marked in a unique manner, our method extracts their relationship that is explicitly communicated in the sentence. For this task, we create a dataset of 375,084 examples and fine-tune language models for relation identification (token classification task) and relation elicitation (sequence-to-sequence task). The token classification approach achieves up to 99.7% accuracy. Upon applying the method to a domain of 4,870 fan system patents, we populate a knowledge base of over 2.93 million facts. Using this knowledge base, we demonstrate how Large Language Models (LLMs) are guided by explicit facts to synthesise knowledge and generate technical and cohesive responses when sought out for knowledge retrieval tasks in the design process.