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Cite this article: Chiarello, F., Cirri, I., Melluso, N., Fantoni, G., Bonaccorsi, A., Pavanello, T. (2019) ‘Approaches to
Automatically Extract Affordances from Patents’, in Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Engineering
Design (ICED19), Delft, The Netherlands, 5-8 August 2019. DOI:10.1017/dsi.2019.255
ICED19
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN, ICED19
5-8 AUGUST 2019, DELFT, THE NETHERLANDS
ICED19
APPROACHES TO AUTOMATICALLY EXTRACT
AFFORDANCES FROM PATENTS
Chiarello, Filippo (1); Cirri, Ilenia (1); Melluso, Nicola (1); Fantoni, Gualtiero (1); Bonaccorsi,
Andrea (1); Pavanello, Tommaso (2)
1: Università di Pisa; 2: Erre Quadro s.r.l.
ABSTRACT
The importance of affordance in Engineering design is well established. Artifacts that are able to activate
spontaneous and immediate users’ reactions are considered the outcome of good design practice.
A huge effort has been made by researchers for understanding affordances: yet these efforts have been
somewhat elusive. In particular, they have been limited to case studies and experimental studies, usually
involving a small subset of affordances. No systematic effort has been carried out to list all known
affordance effects. This paper offers preliminary steps for such an ambitious effort.
We propose a set of three different approaches of Natural Language Processing techniques to be used
to extract meaningful affordance information from the full text of patents: 1) a simple word search, 2) a
lexicon of affordances and 3) a rule-based system.
The results give in-depth measures of how rare affordances in patents are, and a fine grain analysis of
the linguistical construction of affordances. Finally, we show an interesting output of our method, that
has detected affordances for disabled people, showing the ability of our system to automatically collect
design-relevant knowledge.
Keywords: Affordance, Patents Analysis, Design theory, Semantic data processing, Design methods
Contact:
Chiarello, Filippo
Università di Pisa
Italy
filippochiarello.90@gmail.com
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1 INTRODUCTION
The importance of affordance in Engineering design is well established. Artifacts that are able to
activate spontaneous and immediate users’ reactions, leading to a smooth and intuitive use of the
object are considered the outcome of good design practice.
For this reason many studies in Cognitive Psychology have addressed the causes and consequences of
affordance and many others in Engineering Design have explored the possibility to improve the design
practice in order to capture the great benefits of user experience behind affordances.
Yet these efforts have been somewhat elusive. In particular, they have been limited to case studies and
experimental studies, usually involving a small subset of affordances. No systematic effort has been
carried out to create a large scale repository, or knowledge base, for all known affordance effects.
This paper offers the preliminary steps for such an ambitious effort.
It advocates the use of patent texts as the main source of information, and of Natural Language
Processing (NLP) techniques to be used to extract meaningful affordance information from the full
text.
After a short review of the literature, the paper critically discusses the state of the art in information
retrieval of affordances (Section 2), showing its serious limitations. It then explores concurrent NLP
approaches (Section 3), discussing their theoretical background, preliminary results and limitations.
Section 4 shows an interesting preliminary finding about affordances for people with disabilities.
Finally section 5 discusses the main conclusion of the work and proposes some further research path.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
In the present section we present the literature that is relevant to our work. In section 2.1 we show the
works that defined the concept of affordance; in section 2.2 we review the literature related to the
extraction of design concepts from patents.
2.1 Affordance: a concept between Engineering design and Cognitive psychology
The notion of affordance has been extensively studied in Engineering design and Cognitive
psychology, and more recently in Robotics and Artificial intelligence. According to the pioneering
studies of Gibson (1966), “when the constant properties of constant objects are perceived (the shape,
size, color, texture, composition, motion, animation, and position relative to other objects), the
observer can go on to detect their affordances”.
In addition, the cognitive processes that lead to affordances invite the actor to an action of use of the
object (Gibson 2014). The subsequent literature has elaborated on this notion and in some case has
significantly extended it.
Several authors (Cascini 2011, Gibson et al., 1994, Turvey 1992, Stoffregen 2003) agree with the
common point that an affordance manifests itself in relation to the action and direct perception
capabilities of a particular actor. This means that affordance is a relational concept, requiring the
interaction between different entities, rather than a properties of entities themselves (object or actor).
Two mail lines of extension of the concept can be mentioned. First, while in the original formulation
there was an emphasis on visual perception, some authors (Jamone et al., 2018) wonder why this
should not extended to other sensory perceptions. For example, a computer fan provides auditory
affordance to its user via its noise.
Second, following an early suggestion of Maier and Fadel (2003), Chemero (2003) has proposed an
ecological perspective on affordance. He claims that affordances refer to the relation between the actor
and the overall environment that interact with an object, not only with the individual object. In this
contextual perspective, the proposition that describes the affordance relation between two entities of
the type “The apple affords to be eaten by the pig” has the same structure than the proposition “John
is taller than Mary”.
Another group of researchers gives an interesting point of view on affordances (Maier and Fadel,
2003, Brown and Blessing, 2005, Gero and Kannengiesser, 2004, Kannengiesser and Gero, 2012).
Following these contributions in Engineering Design theory, affordances can be seen as “cognitive
shortcuts”, or fast “cognitive processes that reduce the burden of reasoning”. By these shortcuts the
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user skips the entire reasoning about the causality chain and links directly the behavior with the
structural feature of the object (Spreafico et al., 2015).
The concept of “cognitive shortcut” shifts the affordances focus to the perspective of the user, who
needs to perceive the features in the most disambiguous way. When a user is exposed to a certain
number of the same events, manipulating homogeneous classes of objects, he or she immediately
associates the structure of the object (or part of it) with its possible behaviours. However the
affordance problem is designing common products in a way that they are accessible and easily usable
by as many people as possible. The inclusiveness is an important challenge for everyday objects
designing, but nowadays it is limited to specific cases of study and groups of users (such as Dong and
Vanns 2009, Langdon et al., 2015 and Goodman-Deane et al., 2016).
While there is significant theoretical development on the concept of affordance, with significant
agreement between studies in Cognitive psychology and in Engineering design, there is still a lot to be
done to make the concept global and operational. In particular, what is needed is an effort to build up a
repository, or a structured list of affordances, to be used for information search and retrieval, on the
one hand, and for methods of creativity and conceptual design, on the other hand. In turn, this would
require to identify the sources of information for such a large scale effort.
2.2 Extracting design relevant information from patents texts
While there is significant agreement on the concept of affordance and on its importance, there is little
work on how to make it usable for pragmatic purposes. The starting point should be to ask about the
sources of information needed to identify affordances.
We suggest that a promising source is the full text of patents. Patents cover approximately 80% of all
technical information available. They are by nature publicly available and an impressive literature has
been developed in the last few years to extract information from the text of patents, aimed at a variety
of audiences, from readers interested in Strategic management and Technology management (Holger
2003) to marketers and designers (Chiarello 2017). In this paper we focus on information aimed at
supporting the design process, from the conceptual stage down to industrial development. In this
process affordance-related information would be of great value.
At the same time, it must be recognized that there are still large difficulties in extracting information
from patents, in particular in identifying and extracting design related information. The main reason is
that this information (e.g. the user of the invention, the advantages of the design solution described in
the patent or the drawbacks of the state of the art of a class of products) are hidden in patents
documents (Chiarello 2018). With the word hidden we mean that design related information in patents
are:
– Rare: only few patent applicants insert this information in the patent application, since it is not
mandatory for legal reasons.
– Fuzzy: even if an applicant insert design related information, the linguistic form in which this
information is written is complex and obscure, since applicants try to make it hard for other
designers or inventors to find the patent or to design around it.
This means that in order to extract valid information, dedicated analytical techniques must be designed
and implemented. It is well known how Genrich Saulovich Altshuller for the development of TRIZ
identified several design rules by manually inspecting thousands patents, in a fully bottom-up
approach (Savransky 200). Luckily enough, impressive advancements in computational linguistics in
the last two decades made it possible to carry out analysis on the full content of large collections of
patent texts. It is clear that text mining analysis of patents can be a game changing source of
information for designers (Boyack et al., 2013).
3 APPROACHES TO FIND AFFORDANCES IN PATENTS
In this section we explore three different approaches to find affordances in patents. We start with the
simple case of a word search in 3.1, then in section 3.2 we study the development of a lexicon of
affordances and finally in section 3.3 we create a rule-bases sentence extractor able to extract
sentences containing affordances.
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3.1 A text-search approach
A first naïve approach to find affordances in patents is to search for the word affordance (and its
lexical variations). The results of this search would also give us a preliminary metric of how hard is
find affordances in patents. To do that we have to compare the volume of this search with another one
and see if there are differences between patent classes. For this reason, table 1 shows the distribution
of the term affordance and user within the International Patent Classification (the first 15 results in
decreasing order of occurrence for the word affordance).
It is interesting to observe that, within the first 15 sub-classes, the class G06 (Computing; Calculating;
Counting) occurs four times and the section G (Physics) ten times.
Furthermore, from these data it is possible to make the following observations:
the term affordance appears very rarely, less than one in thousand cases
it is not equally distributed across patent classes
the presence of the term is concentrated in just one IPC class, which largely contains
technological devices.
In comparison, searching for user shows that this term is significantly more used than affordance (on
average, from 10% to 40% of patents). Accordingly it is possible to conclude that affordance-related
terms are rarely used in patents in the explicit form. This makes the search for affordance-related
words more difficult- but perhaps more rewarding if successful.
Table 1. Subset of “affordance” and “user” distribution over the IPC sub-classes
Class Name
IPC
All
patents
Patents
including
affordances
% patents
including
affordances
% patents
including
users
Electric digital data
processing
G06F
4,850,637
2,797
0.0005
0.3728
Transmission of digital
Information
H04L
2,495,628
532
0.0002
0.3468
Data processing systems
or methods
G06Q
1,104,958
472
0.0004
0.4343
Pictorial communication
H04N
2,742,473
387
0.0001
0.2182
Image data processing
G06T
844,257
310
0.0003
0.2352
Telephonic
communication
H04M
990,667
202
0.0002
0.3257
Arrangements or circuits
for control
G09G
634,288
197
0.0003
0.1946
Wireless communications
Networks
H04W
1,404,091
197
0.0001
0.4094
Recognition of data
G06K
991,586
194
0.0001
0.2679
Speech analysis or
synthesis
G10L
260,878
137
0.0005
0.2925
Measuring distances,
levels or Bearings
G01C
430,077
90
0.0002
0.1837
Information storage based
G11B
1,418,776
79
0.0001
0.0981
Card, board, or roulette
games
A63F
550,182
72
0.0001
0.1221
Computer systems based
on specific computational
models
G06N
96,705
70
0.0007
0.3903
Signalling or calling
systems
G08B
455,249
68
0.0001
0.1937
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Analysing the problem more in detail, figure 1 shows that, while the absolute occurrence of user-
related and affordance-related words differs by several orders of magnitude, the two classes of words
are correlated.
Patent sub-classes located in the green region refer to Transmission of digital communication and Data
processing. They exhibit a larger occurrence of user-related words, perhaps as a consequence of the
intense use of the word “user” in the technical language of Information technology. Another
interesting part of the figure is the purple region. It shows that there are not patent sub-classes in
which affordance-related terms are used without the user-related ones. In the blue region, it is
reasonable to see the class Speech analysis or synthesis, where the uncanny valley (Mori, 1970) of bad
designed affordances can deeply affect the usability of such systems. We can thus summarise that the
behaviour of the term affordance is anomalous de facto since it is explicit in classes more related to
communication and information than in classes related to standard artefacts. Such patents contain
attempts to recreate “the affordance of an object in the virtual world”, replicate a number of
affordances (of paper) that cannot be easily replaced with existing digital media (G06K), improve the
UI via an intuitive “user interface affordance” (G06T), with “a control affordances widget
containing a set of control buttons” (G06N), “a GUI affordance (such as a scroll bar) with which the
off-screen objects are to moved into view” (G09G).
Probably (see next paragraphs) the affordances in cases of artefacts are more explicit and the
affordance is described more with his -ability than with the term affordance itself.
Figure 1. Correlation between the percentages of occurrence of user-related and
affordance-related words across patent sub-classes
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3.2 Developing a lexicon of affordances: the – Ility approach
Several authors (Maier and Fadel, 2003, Kannengiesser and Gero, 2012, Spreafico et al., 2015,
Jamone et al., 2018) uses the suffix -ability in order to indicate affordances. For example the stairs
afford climbability while the chairs afford sittability. In the present section we study the implications
of using this lexical construction to automatically extract affordances from patents.
First of all, we have to consider the fact that the collection of words ending with –ability can lead to
extract false positives: collecting all the English words ending in – ability is not a suitable strategy. For
example stability is in between a property and an affordance, but only the context helps to discriminate
between the two. Probability, disability, viability and many others certainly do not indicate an
affordance.
In order to eliminate this problem we carried out an extensive domain knowledge-based analysis of
correctly expressed affordances ending with -ability suffix. This analysis leads to the following
restriction: a word ending with the suffix –ability is an affordance if and only if it includes a functional
verb. For example storability is an affordance because to store is a functional verb.
The theoretical rationale for this suggestion comes from the idea that affordances were functions in the
past, but have become affordances due to repeated use. The user immediately connects the implicit
function to one or more product features, without reflecting on the abstract function implied by the
use. In order to reconstruct the origins of the affordance we should start from a careful consideration
of those verbs that are implicit in words ending with –ability and select only those with a functional
content. As we will see, this process can be automatized to a large extent.
At the same time the collection of words ending with –ability can lead to false negative too. In fact it
ignores those expression with functional verbs + ability than cannot be properly expressed in the
English language. Many functional verbs simply do not have an English word that transform them into
an –ability word. Anyway, the constructs ability to, able to, capability of, capable of, easy to plus
functional verbs are in part used to solve some of these language problems. Therefore affordances are
more than the -ability ending words and an extensive and detailed study about their presence in patents
can not ignore such constructs.
Summing up, the candidate collection of words denoting affordances is formed by the subset of words
ending in –ability in which the verb is functional, plus those expressions in which functional verbs
appear after supporting expressions that denote a capability.
It should be noted that this collection may still include ambiguities. In some cases we can have
affordances in the verb + ability structure even if the verb is not strictly functional verbs, at least in the
rigorous definition of Stone and Wood (2000) and Pahl and Beitz (2013). For example, to climb or to
sit are not functional verbs, but rather denote the intention of the user. Hence climbability and
sittability should not be considered affordances stricto sensu. Yet we should pay attention to the
possibility that the natural language of users includes these verbs as truly functional, by attributing the
intention to the object.
For these reasons, the functional affordances lexicon have been built by adding the suffix ability to the
stem (the lexical root of the word) of functional verbs using the list of verbs disclosed by Bonaccorsi
and Fantoni, (2007). Then it has been expanded using a list of -ility ending terms obtained from
WordNet
1
. Finally, through Boolean operation the terms contained within the former group have been
filtered out from the latter. At this point an algorithm is applied to the resulting group in order to
separate words with verbal roots from words without any verbal root and tagged as properties (similar
to the concept of performance (De Benetti et al., 2017)).
The developed lexicon contains 38 functional affordances (e.g.
acceptability, adaptability, alterability
)
and 154 non-functional affordances (e.g.
accessibility, accountability, admirability)
. It was also possible
to collect a list of 123 properties ending in –ility (e.g. ability, agility, amability) giving a clear answer
to the problem of identifying false positives in the collection of words ending with –ability.
3.3 Rules to find sentences containing affordances
The goal of this section is to detect the lexical constructions that are able to identify sentences
containing affordances in a given text. This approach helps to detect those affordances that are not
1
Wordnet.com
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explicitly expressed neither by the word affordance, or the construct verb+ility, respectively explored
in sections 3.1 and 3.2.
After reading a sample of patents, a set of rules is deductively outlined and an algorithm of text mining is
implemented to detect the sentences that match these rules. These rules are shown in second column of
Table 2, while the first column shows a sample of sentences containing affordances extracted using the
relative rules. The sentences where extracted from a random sample of 10,000 patents collected from the
freepatent
2
database. From the entire set, only 398 sentences contained one or more of the rules.
Many of the automatically selected sentences begin with pronouns which relates to the previous part
of the patent. In these cases the rules are observed even if the features are not explicitly present in the
sentence. For example, the sentence “Due to this, the user can easily recognize the used portion of the
tool (4)” is related to the immediately previous sentence in the patent “The used portion (image 122)
and the unused portion (image 123) are displayed by mutually different display modes (for example
different colors)”.
Furthermore, looking at the sentence “The color makes easy to identify the grasping position”
suggests the abstraction of some semantic considerations. Indeed, in this sentence the feature (color)
that promotes the affordance has an impact on one of the five senses. In addition, there is a construct
“easy to” that indicates a design action and there is a verb indicating a function or a learning and
cognitive action. All of these abstractions suggest the deployment of a knowledge-based detection
system as further future effort.
Table 2. Sentences automatically detected with high likelihood of containing affordance
Sentence
Rule
The user can easily navigate a set of visual
representations of the earlier views
The term user followed by the modal verb can
and adverbs such as readily, efficiently, quickly
and easily
Displaying the individual stats in a similar
manner makes it easier for the user to
read/interpret the group
The verb make followed by the comparative
adjective easier and for user to
The map view can include a map filter which
allows the user to quickly sort through providers
on a geographical scale
The verb allow to followed by user and adverbs
such as readily, efficiently, quickly and easily
By representing documents as numbers, a user
can easily use a simple keypad to indicate the
document that he wants to print
The term user followed by can and adverbs such
as readily efficiently, quickly and easily
Superficial burns are easy to clinically diagnose
by eye and to treat with salves and dressings
Forms of the verb to be combined with easy to
A user may proactively identify himself or herself
by entering self-identification information via a
user interface of the user device
The term user followed by the modal verb may
and a verb which indicates the human ability to
detect something
The interface enables a user to more easily view
recent notes and emails associated with a
particular client
The verb enable to combined with user and
adverbs such as readily, efficiently, quickly and
easily
4 A VALUABLE PRELIMINARY RESULT: AFFORDANCES FOR DISABLED
PEOPLE
If the affordances of an artifact are the set of all potential human behavioral interactions that the
artifact itself may allow, disability implies that only a subset of possible interactions are permitted,
with respect to the average user.
2
Freepatents.com
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It is possible to suppose that human senses functioning is similar to a process, in which each element
of a sensory organ performs a biological function. If the sense does not work (e.g. a blind person) or
works wrongly (e.g. a color-blind person), the whole or part of the sensory process will be
compromised. In some cases correcting the sense process malfunction is impossible or too expensive
(at least nowadays). How can affordances help a person with a non-functioning sense?
Human beings normally perceive things throughout the five senses. However, when a sense doesn’t
work (correclty or at all), the perception continues to be made using remaning senses. Therefore
disabled people transfer the perception of things from a non-functioning sense to a functioning one.
Sensory sobstitution is acknowledged in patent literature: new additional features are designed in
inventions intended to disbaled people. Examples of such additional features (e.g. for visual or hearing
impaired people) can be especially found in patents. Considering the sight process malfunctions, it is
possible to find tactile and auditive solutions which makes disable people see via ears that can be
considered as “eyes”.
Within the group of visual impaired people, there are also the color-blind ones, that could be enabled to
see colors using particular combinations of different forms and lights. An example can be found in the
following patent example (see Figure 2) extracted using the rules shown in section 3.3 : “The bar shape
can be formed by either covering portions of a conventional incandescent traffic light or LED traffic
light, or the LEDs can be arranged in two or three rows to form the horizontal bar. Because the bar is
illuminated red, ordinary drivers are able to distinguish the color and stop. Because the light forms a
horizontal bar, color blind drivers are able to easily determine that the light is signaling a stop”.
Figure 2. Traffic control system, United States Patent 8154423
In this example it is possible to see a specific affordance for color-blind people. However, considering
the hearing malfunctions, it is not possible to reach similar conclusions. Searching in the full text of
patents it is not possible to find explicit expressions of affordances for hearing impaired people with
respect to sample that we analyzed in the present paper. It seems that the distribution of affordances
across the five senses is not uniform, so that some senses prevail over others. Probably if humans had
perceived the world throughout hearing like bats, in patents there would be a different distribution of
affordances for hearing impaired people.
5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
The paper offers a preliminary discussion of a new methodology to extract affordance-related
expressions from technical document in automated way. It suggests to use the full text of patents as the
main source of information. It develops a set of three approaches that identifies regular linguistic
constructs and abstract rules for the identification of affordance-related expressions.
The methodologies significantly improves over the existing literature, which is largely based on case
studies and experimental studies, usually involving a small subset of affordances. It is shown that
these words include many false positives and suggests that an appropriate subset of words ending with
–ability can be defined by restricting to those including functional verbs. It is also shown that limiting
the search to words ending with the –ability suffix generates false negatives, or affordance-related
expressions that are formed by several words simply because the English language pronunciation does
not permit to collapse the meaning into one word.
On the basis of this methodology, an extensive search for affordance-related expressions is carried out
in the full text of patents.
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It has also been shown that the number of patents including explicitly the word “affordance” and
“user” are correlated, but for new and emerging technologies the frequency of user-related words
largely outnumbers the affordance-related frequency. This is a hint to the dynamic process of
affordance creation, which requires extensive user experience before becoming an automatic cognitive
mechanism.
Finally, the conditions for creating practical tools to support the designer activity are identified.
Searching for statistically validated correspondences between features of objects and users’ immediate
experiences will deliver a large collection of suggestions for practical use by designers.
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