An Analysis Engine for Dependable Elicitation of Natural Language Use Case Description and Its Application to Industrial Use Cases

LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE: This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g. , payment of royalties). Copies may be requested from IBM T. J. Abstract We present 1) a novel application of a pipeline of linguistic analysis engines for understanding contents of a natural language use case specification; and 2) results of the first of a kind large scale experiment of application of linguistic techniques to industrial use cases. In spite of the recent developments in formal specification, natural language remains the predominant mode for specifying requirements. Therefore, for dependable system development and for automation of software engineering activities, a robust and scalable natural language processing technique is required that can translate natural language textual requirements into computer based models. We present one such technique that can process natural language use case descriptions. The novelty of our technique lies in our choice of architecture , which enables us to configure and extend the analysis engine to multiple domains and languages. We also report the results of applying our prototype to 80 industrial and academic use case descriptions. The results of our experiment indicate that our approach is very promising.

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