Despite the advantages that object technology can provide to the software development community and its customers, the fundamental problems associated with identifying objects, their attributes, and methods remain: it is a largely manual process driven by heuristics that analysts acquire through experience. While a number of methods exist for requirements development and specification, very few tools exist to assist analysts in making the transition from textual descriptions to other notations for object-oriented analysis and other conceptual models. We describe a methodology and a prototype tool. Linguistic Assistant for Domain Analysis (LIDA), which provide linguistic assistance in the model development process. We first present our methodology to conceptual modeling through linguistic analysis. We give an overview of LIDA's functionality and present its technical design and the functionality of its components. We also provide a comparison of LIDA's functionality with that of other research prototypes. Finally, we present an example of how LIDA is used in a conceptual modeling task.