A knowledge representation semantic network for a natural language syntactic analyzer based on the UML

Abstract

The need for improving software processes approximated the software engineering and artificial intelligence areas. Artificial intelligence techniques have been used as a support to software development processes, particularly through intelligent assistants that offer a knowledge-based support to software process’ activities. The context of the present work is a project for an intelligent assistant that implements a linguistic technique with the purpose of extracting object-oriented elements from requirement specifications in natural language through two main functionalities: the syntactic and semantic analyses. The syntactic analysis has the purpose of extracting the syntactic constituents from a sentence; and the semantic analysis has the goal of extracting the meaning from a set of sentences, i.e., a text. This paper focuses on the syntactic analysis functionality and applies the UML to its core as a semantic network for knowledge representation, based on the premise that the UML is de facto a standard general modeling language for software development.