Requirements Analysis: Concept Extraction and Translation of Textual Specifications to Executable Models

Requirements engineering, the first phase of any software development project, is the Achilles' heel of the whole development process, as requirements documents are often inconsistent and incomplete. In industrial requirements documents, natural language is the main presentation means. This results in the fact that the requirements documents are imprecise, incomplete, and inconsistent. A viable way to detect inconsistencies and omissions in documents is to extract system models from them. In our previous work we developed approaches translating textual scenarios to message sequence charts (MSCs) and textual descriptions of automata to automata themselves. It turned out that these approaches are highly sensitive to proper definition of terms (communicating objects for MSCs, states for automata). The goal of the presented paper is a systematic comparison of different term extraction heuristics, as a preliminary stage of MSC or automata extraction. The extracted terms were declared to communicating objects (in the case of MSCs) or to states (in the case of automata). The heuristics were compared on the basis of correctness of resulting MSCs and automata. We came to the conclusion that named entity recognition is the best performing technique for term extraction from requirements documents.