Automatic Generation of UML Diagrams From Product Requirements Described by Natural Language

In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to transform a requirement text described by natural language into two UML diagrams — use case and class diagrams. The transformation consists of two steps: from natural language to an intermediate graphic language called recursive object model (ROM) and from ROM to UML. The ROM diagram corresponding to a text includes the main semantic information implied in the text by modeling the relations between words in a text. Based on the semantics in the ROM diagram, a set of generation rules are proposed to generate UML diagrams from a ROM diagram. A software prototype R2U is presented as a proof of concept for this approach. A case study shows that the proposed approach is feasible. The proposed approach can be applied to requirements modeling in various engineering fields such as software engineering, automotive engineering, and aerospace engineering. The future work is pointed out at the end of this paper.