Automatic concept identification of software requirements in Turkish

Abstract

Software requirements include description of the features for the target system and express the expectations of users. In the analysis phase, requirements are transformed into easy-to-understand conceptual models that facilitate communication between stakeholders. Although creating conceptual models using requirements is mostly implemented manually by analysts, the number of models that automate this process has increased recently. Most of the models and tools are developed to analyze requirements in English, and there is no study for agglutinative languages such as Turkish or Finnish. In this study, we propose an automatic concept identification model that transforms Turkish requirements into Unified Modeling Language class diagrams to ease the work of individuals on the software team and reduce the cost of software projects. The proposed work is based on natural language processing techniques and a new rule-set containing twenty-six rules is created to find object-oriented design elements from requirements. Since there is no publicly available dataset on the online repositories, we have created a well-defined dataset containing twenty software requirements in Turkish and have made it publicly available on GitHub to be used by other researchers. We also propose a novel evaluation model based on an analytical hierarchy process that considers the experts' views and calculate the performance of the overall system as 89 %. We can state that this result is promising for future works in this domain.