Extraction of use case diagram elements using natural language processing and network science

Abstract

Software engineering artifact extraction from natural language requirements without human intervention is a challenging task. Out of these artifacts, the use case plays a prominent role in software design and development. In the literature, most of the approaches are either semi-automated or necessitate formalism or make use of restricted natural language for the extraction of use cases from textual requirements. In this paper, we resolve the challenge of automated artifact extraction from natural language requirements. We propose an automated approach to generate use cases, actors, and their relationships from natural language requirements. Our proposed approach involves no human intervention or formalism. To automate the proposed approach, we have used Natural Language Processing and Network Science. Our proposed approach provides promising results for the extraction of use case elements from natural language requirements. We validate the proposed approach using several literature-based case studies. The proposed approach significantly improves the results in comparison to an existing approach. On average, the proposed approach achieves around 71.5% accuracy (F-Measure), whereas the baseline method achieves around 16% accuracy (F-Measure) on average. The evaluation of the proposed approach on the literature-based case studies shows its significance for the extraction of use case elements from natural language requirements. The approach reduces human effort in software design and development.