In the early phases of the software development process, specifications are mostly written in a natural language rather than formal models, which is not supported by the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). For this reason, the Semantic of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) is proposed by the Object Management Group to represent the textual specifications in a language comprehensible by both of humans and machines, to facilitate its integration in the MDA lifecycle. However, businesspeople are usually not familiar with SBVR standard. In this paper we present an approach to automatically transform textual business rules to an SBVR model, to facilitate its integration in nowadays information technology infrastructures. Our approach is distinguished from existing works in that it uses an in-depth Natural Language Processing to extract a more comprehensible SBVR model that includes the semantic formulation of each business rule statement, coupled with a Terminological Dictionary of extracted concepts, to which we have added further specifications such as definitions and synonyms. The evaluation of our approach shows that for three sets of business rules statements taken from different domains, we could generate the correct meaning with an average of F1-score exceeding 87%.
Business Rules (BR) are usually written by different stakeholders, which makes them vulnerable to contain different designations for a same concept. Such problem can be the source of a not well orchestrated behaviors. Whereas identification of synonyms is manual or totally neglected in most approaches dealing with natural language Business Rules. In this paper, we present an automated approach to identify semantic similarity between terms in textual BR using Natural Language Processing and knowledge-based algorithm refined using heuristics. Our method is unique in that it also identifies abbreviations/expansions (as a special case of synonym) which is not possible using a dictionary. Then, results are saved in a standard format (SBVR) for reusability purposes. Our approach was applied on more than 160 BR statements divided on three cases with an accuracy between 69% and 87% which suggests it to be an indispensable enhancement for other methods dealing with textual BR.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.