Semi-automatic Generation of Extended Finite State Machines from Natural Language Standard Documents

Abstract

Many requirement documents are written in natural language and, therefore, may contain problems such as inconsistencies and ambiguities. To minimize these problems, there is a trend in Software Engineering to use models to represent systems. These models are obtained from textual requirements. However, manual modelling is a complex task and, in order to do it semi-automatically, one has to deal with problems such as the kind of model to be generated, the automation degree to be achieved, and the quality of the document that must be processed. We propose a methodology to semi-automatically generate Extended Finite State Machines (EFSMs) from natural language standard documents. We used Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and tools to extract information from the document, and implemented a prototype which generates EFSMs. The generated EFSMs were validated with a model checking tool, and manually evaluated by comparing them with the manually generated models.