CM-Builder: An Automated NL-based CASE Tool






Analysis, Evaluation


Graphical CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) 
tools provide considerable help in documenting the 
output of the Analysis and Design stages 
of software development. However, these tools do 
not contribute to the process of analysis 
itself. This paper describes an NL-based CASE 
tool called CM-Builder which aims at supporting 
the Analysis stage of software development in 
an Object-Oriented framework. CM-Builder uses robust Natural 
Language Processing techniques to analyse software requirements 
texts written in English and build an 
integrated discourse model of the processed text, 
represented in a Semantic Network. This Semantic 
Network is then used to automatically construct 
an initial UML Class Model representing the 
object classes mentioned in the text and 
the relationships among them. The initial model 
can be directly input to a graphical 
CASE tool for further refinement by a 
human analyst. CM-Builder has been evaluated in 
blind trials against a collection unseen software 
requirements texts and this paper reports the 
results of the evaluation, together with the 
evaluation methodology. The results are very encouraging 
and demonstrate that tools such as CM-Builder 
have the potential to play an important 
role in the software development process.