Abstract
Conceptual design has been recentely increasing its importance and it has been strongly desired to develop computer support technology for this design process. A major issue is computer support of the generation process of function structures. This process is carried out depending strongly on designer's implicit knowledge which is hard to unravel. Therefore, it is difficult to establish a methodology for supporting this process. One approach to the function structure generation support is exploiting functions and their structures of existing products, and some methods taking this approach have been proposed. However, the methods requires users to analyze the function structures of existing products and build a database of them in advance, which are labor-intensive. It is desired to develop a method which does not require such labor-intensive works by taking another approach where information other than existing products is utilized. This research takes this approach and focuses on linguistic information included in functions which are described in a national language. In this paper, relationships among verbs included in the national language description of functions are discussed and a function structure generation method exploiting the relationships is proposed.
