Automatic Generation of Conceptual Models from Functional Requirements using Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Conceptual modeling serves as a bridge between functional requirements and the design of a system. It creates a clear and concise model of software requirements that represent the important features and attributes of the system being modeled. Conceptual modeling in natural language processing (NLP) is an open research topic as it enables the developer and the stakeholder to understand and process natural language text, and is essential for many applications such as text classification, information extraction, machine translation, etc. Most existing studies on conceptual modeling have focused on the generation of conceptual models in the form of use cases, class diagrams, activity diagrams, and many more from user stories the problem with the extraction of conceptual from user stories is that user stories are only supported by the agile development process, the dataset used by their approaches consists of maximum 20 to 30 requirements covering only a few domains, data is the principal requirement for the development of any system. Large-sized datasets covering different domains develop efficient and more accurate systems. This thesis research contributes to this research gap. In this research, we have proposed an approach for the automatic extraction of a conceptual model in the form of a class diagram and product goal model from functional requirements using natural language processing techniques. Our approach uses functional requirements for extraction of conceptual models which are supported by almost all development process and a dataset used by our approach consists of 9529 functional requirements from 315 final-year projects, these projects are related to different SDLC models such as waterfall, hybrid, etc., and are supported by different programming languages such as react, Python, etc., and different domains such as x online services, medical etc. From these different projects in this study, we have covered 4 [hospital management system, online cricket game, online portal for FYP submission, University management system] projects for the creation of a product goal model and 6[hospital management system, online bookstore, online cricket game, online portal for FYP submission, University management system, and online ride booking application] project for creation of class diagram. and each set of projects contains almost 100 to 150 functional requirements Moreover, our approach provides early verification of the conceptual models produced by the designer, which will save time in the code generation and the debugging of the software. To evaluate our approach, automated-generated models are compared with models generated by human experts[5 students of MS computer science] using three evaluation measures: precision, recall, and F1-score. The highest macro-average score was 98%, 82.7%, 87% for elements of the class diagram, and 94%, 86%, and 86% for elements of the product goal model.