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Generating Natural Language specifications from UML class diagrams

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Abstract

Early phases of software development are known to be problematic, difficult to manage and errors occurring during these phases are expensive to correct. Many systems have been developed to aid the transition from informal Natural Language requirements to semi-structured or formal specifications. Furthermore, consistency checking is seen by many software engineers as the solution to reduce the number of errors occurring during the software development life cycle and allow early verification and validation of software systems. However, this is confined to the models developed during analysis and design and fails to include the early Natural Language requirements. This excludes proper user involvement and creates a gap between the original requirements and the updated and modified models and implementations of the system. To improve this process, we propose a system that generates Natural Language specifications from UML class diagrams. We first investigate the variation of the input language used in naming the components of a class diagram based on the study of a large number of examples from the literature and then develop rules for removing ambiguities in the subset of Natural Language used within UML. We use WordNet, a linguistic ontology, to disambiguate the lexical structures of the UML string names and generate semantically sound sentences. Our system is developed in Java and is tested on an independent though academic case study.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments, suggestions and insightful questions that helped improve the content and structure of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Informatics Research Institute, Newton Building, University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT, UK

    Farid Meziane & Nikos Athanasakis

  2. School of Computer Science, National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester, 131 Princess St, Manchester, M1 7DN, UK

    Sophia Ananiadou

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  1. Farid Meziane
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  2. Nikos Athanasakis
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  3. Sophia Ananiadou
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Correspondence to Farid Meziane.

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Meziane, F., Athanasakis, N. & Ananiadou, S. Generating Natural Language specifications from UML class diagrams. Requirements Eng 13, 1–18 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-007-0054-0

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