Integrating Natural Language Techniques in OO-Method

An approach that involves natural language analysis techniques for the treatment of software system functional requirements is described in this paper. This approach is used as the basis for a process developed to generate sequence diagrams automatically from the textual specification of use cases. This facility has been integrated in the Requirements Engineering Phase of OO-Method, an automatic production environment of software. For this purpose, a translator that is based on natural language parser is used. The translator provides grammatical information to each use case sentence and it identifies the corresponding interaction. The automatic transformation is conceived and specified following an orientation that is based on models and patterns. The results of the validation of the transformation patterns are presented.