Enhancing the extraction of SBVR business vocabularies and business rules from UML use case diagrams with natural language processing

Being among the best-selling and most advanced features of model-driven development, model-to-model transformation could help improving one of the most time- and resource-consuming efforts in the process of model-driven information systems engineering, namely, discovery and specification of business vocabularies and business rules within the problem domain. Nonetheless, despite the relatively high levels of automation throughout the whole systems' model-driven development process, business modeling stage remains among the most under re-searched areas throughout the whole process. In this paper, we introduce a novel natural language processing (NLP) technique to one of our latest developments for the automatic extraction of SBVR business vocabularies and business rules from UML use case diagrams. This development remains arguably the most comprehensive development of this kind currently available in public. The experiment provided proof that the developed NLP enhancement delivered even better extraction results compared to the already satisfactory performance of the previous development. This work contributes to the research in the areas of model transformations and NLP within the model-driven development of information systems, and beyond.

[1]  Scott W. Ambler,et al.  The Elements of UML™ 2.0 Style: UML Deployment Diagrams , 2005 .

[2]  Barbara von Halle,et al.  Business Rules Applied: Building Better Systems Using the Business Rules Approach , 2001 .

[3]  Jordi Cabot,et al.  From UML/OCL to SBVR specifications: A challenging transformation , 2010, Inf. Syst..

[4]  Rimantas Butleris,et al.  Extracting SBVR business vocabularies and business rules from UML use case diagrams , 2018, J. Syst. Softw..

[5]  Imran Sarwar Bajwa,et al.  Back to Origin: Transformation of Business Process Models to Business Rules , 2012, Business Process Management Workshops.

[6]  George A. Miller,et al.  WordNet: A Lexical Database for English , 1995, HLT.

[7]  Rimantas Butleris,et al.  The Need for Business Vocabularies in BPM or ISD Related Activities: Survey Based Study , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology.

[8]  Mihai Surdeanu,et al.  The Stanford CoreNLP Natural Language Processing Toolkit , 2014, ACL.

[9]  Rimantas Butleris,et al.  Approach for Semi-automatic Extraction of Business Vocabularies and Rules from Use Case Diagrams , 2014, EEWC.

[10]  Håkan Burden,et al.  Natural language generation from class diagrams , 2011, MoDeVVa.

[11]  Rimantas Butleris,et al.  An Approach for Extracting Business Vocabularies from Business Process Models , 2013, Inf. Technol. Control..

[12]  Albert Gatt,et al.  SimpleNLG: A Realisation Engine for Practical Applications , 2009, ENLG.

[13]  Dan Klein,et al.  Feature-Rich Part-of-Speech Tagging with a Cyclic Dependency Network , 2003, NAACL.

[14]  Scott W. Ambler,et al.  The Elements of UML(TM) 2.0 Style , 2005 .

[15]  Lina Nemuraite,et al.  VETIS TOOL FOR EDITING AND TRANSFORMING SBVR BUSINESS VOCABULARIES AND BUSINESS RULES INTO UML & OCL MODELS , 2010 .

[16]  Ewan Klein,et al.  Natural Language Processing with Python , 2009 .

[17]  Beatrice Santorini,et al.  The Penn Treebank: An Overview , 2003 .

[18]  Christopher D. Manning,et al.  Incorporating Non-local Information into Information Extraction Systems by Gibbs Sampling , 2005, ACL.

[19]  Sophia Ananiadou,et al.  Generating Natural Language specifications from UML class diagrams , 2008, Requirements Engineering.