An Approach to Mine SBVR Vocabularies and Rules from Business Documents

Enterprises model the behavior of their business to prepare a communication standard for business analysts and to specify requirements to Information Technology (IT) people. The communication gap between IT group and business analysts, who lie on the opposite end of the business spectrum exists due to the different terminologies used in their respective fields regarding the same context. This gap has led to major software failures which prompted the OMG group has come up with a new standard - Semantic of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR). Declarative models are provided by SBVR to represent Business Vocabulary and Business Rules which can be understood by everyone working throughout the business spectrum. Each business is governed by business rules which are constrained by the regulation policy set up by the policy guidelines of the organization and government regulations set up on the organization. Business rules are specified in documents like user guides, requirement documents, terms and conditions, do's and don'ts. Typically a Business Analyst interprets the document and manually extracts rules based on his understanding which leads to potential discrepancies, ambiguities and quality issues in the software system. To minimize such errors, in this paper we present an unsupervised approach to automatically extract SBVR vocabularies and rules from domain-specific business documents. We also present our initial results and comparative study with our earlier approach.