Application of formal models provides many benefits for the software and system development, however, the learning curve of formal languages could be a critical factor for an industrial project. Thus, a natural language specification that reflects all the aspects of the formal model might help to understand the model and be especially useful for the stakeholders who do not know the corresponding formal language. Moreover, an automated generation of the documentation from the model would replace manual updates of the documentation for the cases the model is modified. This paper presents an ongoing work on generating natural language specifications from formal models. Our goal is to generate documentation in English from the basic modelling artefacts, such as data types, state machines, and architectural components. To allow further formal analysis of the generated specification, we restrict English to its subset, Attempto Controlled English.
As several attempts have been made to automate the requirement capture, there is another approach for the automatic construction of Object-oriented design model in UML diagram from natural language requirement specification. Mala and Uma @cite_33 present a methodology that utilizes the automatic reference resolution and eliminates the user intervention. The input problem statement is split into sentences for tagging by sentence splitter in order to get parts of speech for every word. The nouns and verbs are then identified by tagged texts based on simple phrasal grammars. Reference resolver is used to remove ambiguity by pronouns. The final text is then simplified by the normaliser for mapping the words into object-oriented system elements. The result produced by the system is compared with human output on the basic analysis of the text. The approach is promising to introduce a method to restructure the natural language text into modelling language in respect of system requirements specifications. Although there is a shortage of the efficiency in the tagger and reference resolver that result in unnatural expressions and misunderstandings, it can be improved by building a knowledge base for the system elements generation.
@cite_33
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Application of natural language understanding to requirements gathering remains a field that has only limited explorations so far. This paper presents an approach to extract the object oriented elements of the required system. This approach starts with assigning the parts of speech tags to each word in the given input document. Further, to resolve the ambiguity posed by the pronouns, the pronoun resolutions are performed before normalizing the text. Finally the elements of the object-oriented system namely the classes, the attributes, methods and relationships between the classes, sequence of actions, the use-cases and actors are identified by mapping the 'parts of speech- tagged' words onto the Object Oriented Modeling Language elements using mapping rules which is the key to a successful implementation of user requirements.