Analysis modeling refers to the task of identifying domain objects, their attributes and operations, and the relationships between these objects from software requirements specifications which are usually written in some natural language. There have been a few efforts to automate this task, but they seem to be largely constrained by the language related issues as well as the lack of a systematic transformation process. In this paper, we propose a systematic, automated transformation approach which first interprets the specification sentences based on the Hornby's verb patterns, and then uses semantic relationships between the words in the sentences, obtained from Type Dependencies using Stanford NL Parser, to identify the domain elements from them. With the help of a controlled experiment, we show that the analysis class diagrams generated by the proposed approach are far more correct, far more complete and less redundant than those generated by the exiting automated approaches.

This paper presents AnModeler, a tool for generating analysis models from software requirements specified using use cases. The tool uses the Stanford natural language parser to extract type dependencies (TDs) and parts of speech tags (POS-tags) of sentences from input Use Case Specification (UCS). Then, it identifies sentence structures using a set of rules framed based on Hornby's verb patterns. With the information of the TDs, POS tags, and the identified sentence structures, the tool discovers domain elements, viz.: domain objects (including their attributes and operations) and interactions between them; it consolidates the domain information as a class diagram (as well as a sequence diagram). An experiment conducted on 10 UCSs with two industry experts as subjects showed that the analysis class diagrams generated by AnModeler were remarkably close to those generated by the two industry experts. Being lightweight and easy to use, the tool can also be used to assist students and young developers in acquiring object-oriented domain modeling skills quickly.