OCL Constraints Generation from Natural Language Specification

Abstract

Object Constraint Language (OCL) plays a key role in Unified Modeling Language (UML). In the UML standards, OCL is used for expressing constraints such as welldefinedness criteria. In addition OCL can be used for specifying constraints on the models and pre/post conditions on operations, improving the precision of the specification. As a result, OCL has received considerable attention from the research community. However, despite its key role, there is a common consensus that OCL is the least adopted among all languages in the UML. It is often argued that, software practitioners shy away from OCL due to its unfamiliar syntax. To ensure better adoption of OCL, the usability issues related to producing OCL statement must be addressed. To address this problem, this paper aims to preset a method involving using Natural Language expressions and Model Transformation technology. The aim of the method is to produce a framework so that the user of UML tool can write constraints and pre/post conditions in English and the framework converts such natural language expressions to the equivalent OCL statements. As a result, the approach aims at simplifying the process of generation of OCL statements, allowing the user to benefit form the advantages provided by UML tools that support OCL. The suggested approach relies on Semantic Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) to support formulation of natural language expressions and their transformations to OCL. The paper also presents outline of a prototype tool that implements the method.

From Regulatory Texts to BRMS: How to Guide the Acquisition of Business Rules?

“…Figure 4 shows the example of Rule R5, on which a decontextualization transformation (R125) and then a syntactic normalization (R124) are applied before it is decomposed into two elementary and independent sub-rules (R126 and R127). We tried to automatically translate the initial and the final candidate rules into SBVR, using the NL2SBVR tool [2].The result ( Figure 5) shows that the meaning of the initial sentence is lost in the translation (statement 1), but that the translation works for the transformed final candidate rules giving valid SBVR statements (2 and 3).…”

“…Recently, [2] has proposed NL2SBVR 5 , a tool to automatically translate NL into SBVR-SE. According to the reported experiments, the complexity of the translation depends on the number of clauses that compose a sentence.…”

Automating Inference of OCL Business Rules from User Scenarios

“…However, such a transformation is obviously hard [18] and as far as we know, there is currently no effective solution for it [19]. Within the context modeling with User Scenarios, OCL business rules should also be inferred from the instance-level information of the system.…”

Lips: An IDE for model driven engineering based on natural language processing

“…Saeki et al [22] presented an approach similar to [19] that associates words in English sentences to software concepts found in the object oriented programming paradigm. The extraction of OCL constraints from English sentences has been considered in [23] and [21]. Most of the considered approaches are aiming for fully automatic methods and restrict the input language to achieve this goal.…”