Identifying domain elements from textual specifications

Abstract

Analysis modeling refers to the task of identifying domain objects, their attributes and operations, and the relationships between these objects from software requirements specifications which are usually written in some natural language. There have been a few efforts to automate this task, but they seem to be largely constrained by the language related issues as well as the lack of a systematic transformation process. In this paper, we propose a systematic, automated transformation approach which first interprets the specification sentences based on the Hornby's verb patterns, and then uses semantic relationships between the words in the sentences, obtained from Type Dependencies using Stanford NL Parser, to identify the domain elements from them. With the help of a controlled experiment, we show that the analysis class diagrams generated by the proposed approach are far more correct, far more complete and less redundant than those generated by the exiting automated approaches.