Extraction of Message Sequence Charts from Software Use-Case Descriptions

Girish Palshikar, Nitin Ramrakhiyani, Sangameshwar Patil, Sachin Pawar, Swapnil Hingmire, Vasudeva Varma, Pushpak Bhattacharyya


Abstract
Software Requirement Specification documents provide natural language descriptions of the core functional requirements as a set of use-cases. Essentially, each use-case contains a set of actors and sequences of steps describing the interactions among them. Goals of use-case reviews and analyses include their correctness, completeness, detection of ambiguities, prototyping, verification, test case generation and traceability. Message Sequence Chart (MSC) have been proposed as a expressive, rigorous yet intuitive visual representation of use-cases. In this paper, we describe a linguistic knowledge-based approach to extract MSCs from use-cases. Compared to existing techniques, we extract richer constructs of the MSC notation such as timers, conditions and alt-boxes. We apply this tool to extract MSCs from several real-life software use-case descriptions and show that it performs better than the existing techniques. We also discuss the benefits and limitations of the extracted MSCs to meet the above goals.
Anthology ID:
N19-2017
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Industry Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Anastassia Loukina, Michelle Morales, Rohit Kumar
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
130–137
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-2017
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-2017
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Girish Palshikar, Nitin Ramrakhiyani, Sangameshwar Patil, Sachin Pawar, Swapnil Hingmire, Vasudeva Varma, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2019. Extraction of Message Sequence Charts from Software Use-Case Descriptions. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Industry Papers), pages 130–137, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Extraction of Message Sequence Charts from Software Use-Case Descriptions (Palshikar et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-2017.pdf