Extracting Concepts from the Software Requirements Specification Using Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Extracting concepts from the software requirements is one of the first step on the way to automating the software development process. This task is difficult due to the ambiguity of the natural language used to express the requirements specification. The methods used so far consist mainly of statistical analysis of words and matching expressions with a specific ontology of the domain in which the planned software will be applicable. This article proposes a method and a tool to extract concepts based on a grammatical analysis of requirements written in English without the need to refer to specialized ontology. These concepts can be further expressed in the class model, which then can be the basis for the object-oriented analysis of the problem. This method uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques to recognize parts of speech and to divide sentences into phrases and also the WordNet dictionary to search for known concepts and recognize relationships between them.