Generating Entity Relationship Diagram from
Requirement Specification based on NLP
P. G. T. H. Kashmira
Department of Computational Mathematics
University of Moratuwa
Sri Lanka
thkashmira@gmail.com
Abstract—An entity relationship data model is a high level
conceptual model that describes information as entities,
attributes relationships and constraints. Entity relationship
diagrams to design the database of the software. It involves a
sequence of tasks including extracting the requirements,
identifying the entities, their attributes, the relationship
between the entities, constraints and finally drawing the
diagram. As such entity relationship diagram design has
become a tedious task for novice designer. This research
addresses the above issue, proposes a Natural Language
Processing based tool which accepts requirement specification
written in English language and generates entity relationship
diagram.
Keywords—Entity relationship data model, Natural
Language Processing, Requirement Specification.
I. INTRODUCTION
Natural language descriptions often need to be analyzed,
transformed and restructured into a form of design notation
during the development of software applications [1]. Recent
researches have been focused on automating the extraction
of information from natural language text using Natural
Language Processing (NLP)[2].
Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides several
types of diagrams that are used to increase the simplicity
and conception of an application at the development. Entity
Relationship (ER) diagram is one of the UML diagrams and
has played a central role when designing a system's
database. However, obtaining entity-relationship models
from a system's specifications requires expert knowledge
and may be a lengthy process with time-consuming. Errors
occurred during these phases can be difficult to fix later on.
There are some graphical CASE tools such as Rational
Rose, Microsoft Visio, Smart Draw etc. which provides help
in documenting UML diagrams. However, they do not
contribute to the initial, difficult stage of the analysis
process that of identifying the entities, attributes,
relationships, keys, cardinalities and other generalization
specialization like extended features. Therefore it is
desirable to have a tool or a system, which the students,
novice analysts could use to automatically generate a quality
ER diagram based on natural language requirement
specifications.
The primary goal of this research proposes an approach
to identify the entities, their attributes, the relationship
between the entities to automate the ER diagram design
process based on requirement specifications written in the
English language by eliminating the user involvements in the
tasks which need expert and domain knowledge. Then even
nontechnical people in small enterprises would be able to use
this tool to generate ER-diagram automatically.
978-1-5386-4417-1/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
Sagara Sumathipala
Department of Computational Mathematics
University of Moratuwa
Sri Lanka
sagaras@uom.lk
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section II presents related work. Section III provides the
proposed model and Section IV presents the implementation
and Section V presents the evaluation and Section VI
discusses the research.
II. RELATED WORKS
User requirement analysis is an Information Extraction
application of NLP [2]. It needs to be able to distinguish
between relevant and non-relevant information quickly and
respond to newly obtained data into the application. For an
example consider the sentence: There are lecturers who
teach courses. This sentence automatically conveys a large
amount of information. Because of language as well as
world knowledge the reader knows that parties in an action,
a relationship exists, lecturer and course are not specific,
and the course is taught to students and so on. At the
information extraction process, above mentioned complex
information need to be captured when reading the sentence.
It may comprise with a linguistic analysis of the NL for
syntax and semantics, a set of transformation rules for
extracting, rules and heuristics for handling world
knowledge, classification rules for modeling the behaviors
[3].
In a sense of data modeling, Information Extraction is
the identification of specific elements within the user’s
requirements entered in textual form (e.g.: entities,
attributes, relationships, etc.). Therefore, the role of NLP
would be in identifying and extracting nouns, and other POS
needed in the determination of entities, relationships,
attributes, cardinalities [3]. There are several steps in NLP
such as morphological analysis, tokenization, tagged POS,
chunking, parsing which can be used to process the user
requirement entered in textual natural language.
Few researchers have done UML diagram generation
using natural language processing to bridge the gap between
requirement analysis and design phases of software
applications. Most of the researchers have used linguistic-
based, rule-based and pattern-based approaches to get
expected outcomes and mostly considered about the class
diagram or the use case diagram. The following section
provides a short review of the previous work related to this
area.
Authors in [4]-[9] have used NLP and linguistic theories
for translating English sentence structures into a UML
diagram's components. (Specifying nouns as objects/entities,
verbs as methods or relationships, adjectives as attributes)
However, these attempts are not complete and fully
accurate. Because entities can be identified by nouns in a
requirement specification, nouns not only refer to entities
but also to attributes and other concepts. Further entities can
also be identified from verb phrases and hidden
requirements. Therefore this technique can only support to
manual or semi-automatic concept extraction. Also,
proposed rules are built based on the syntax of NLs. Some
authors [10],[11],[17] suggested vocabulary constraints and
controlled sentence structures into specifications to obtain
good results from linguistic processing. But it has some
limitations and causes burdens when writing the
requirements.
Heuristics, based on linguistic rules [12], are reported to
be utilized in many of the systems like [13],[14],[15]. Most
of the approaches have used NLP based rule-based systems
to analyze the syntactic structure of input text and infer data
model entities, attributes, relationships. Among them, the
use of heuristics to aid the construction of ER models from
natural language has been scare. Those approaches used the
parser and then fed to the syntactic heuristics to identify
suitable data modeling elements. Only researches in [15]
explore the value of semantic analysis to the understanding
of the results of parsing, lexical information, context, and
common sense reasoning to have a more expressive
power.
Authors in [16] used pattern based NLP techniques to
extract the relevant concepts from requirement
specifications. ABCD tool used regular expressions to
represent patterns and enabled to extract relationships,
multiplicity, and generalization of class diagrams, but failed
to deal with redundant information and incomplete
information.
All the systems discussed here need user involvement to
improve the accuracy of these systems during the processing
to resolve ambiguities between the entities and attributes
identifications, duplicates and synonym entities and so on.
Further, these tools have been developed to support
designers, analysts, and students, not for non-technical
users. These tools are not available as they are not available
in free of cost. Most of them are at the laboratory level.
Therefore it is desirable to develop a tool that could be used
even by non-technical people without any cost to generate
ERD based on the requirement specification written in
English.
III. PROPOSED APPROACH
Fig. 1 depicts the model of the proposed approach which
generates the ER diagram by addressing the issues of
incomplete information and redundancies in requirement
specifications with minimum user intervention. The
proposed model contains three major modules namely Pre-
processing Module, Machine Learning Module, and ERD
Modeling Module.
Pre- Processing Module analyzes individual words and
non-word tokens are separated from words. Depending on
the standard of entities naming, the entity's name must be in
a singular form. Apply this standard by analyzing individual
nouns to make sure they are appropriate for entity name by
removing plural suffixes and converting plural entity names
into singular. Then sentence tokenization and punctuation
removal. Machine Learning Module identifies entities,
attributes, and relationships from the given text. By using
supervised learning, it understands the above-mentioned ER
concepts as follows.
Identify entities and sub-entities to design
specialization/generalization concepts. Identify the attributes
of entities. Identify relationship between entities/sub
entities-attributes, entities-entities, entities-sub entities,
attributes-attributes. Identify relationship types between
entities (association, generalization). Identify cardinalities in
a relationship in the ER diagram (One to One, One to Many,
Many to Many). Most of the requirement specifications
consist of participating entities and their interactions/work
processes. ER diagram designer decides related attributes of
the entities by using world knowledge. To address that issue
proposed model uses ontology and web mining to filter out
the relevant attributes into extracted entities.
ERD Modeling Module will be a visual studio modeling
diagram project that consists of a drawing of the ER
diagram using extracted entities, attributes, relationships and
cardinalities.
Inputs of the proposed model are requirement
specifications written in English language and output will be
a drawing of an ER diagram. The input will be taken from
the web application and users of the tool interact only with
the web application. The user will be able to upload a text
file that contains a requirement specification or just copy
and paste the text in the text area of the application. The
process of the system begins by reading a text containing a
requirement specification in English. Then, the
preprocessing modules’ results will feed into a machine
learning module to identify suitable data modeling concepts.
Finally, the ERD modeling module will result in a drawing
of an ER diagram.
Requirement
Specification
Pre-processing
NLP
Module Techniques
Machine Learning
Module
Entity Relationships Attributes Cardinality
Web Mining Ontology
ERD Modeling
Module
ER Diagram
Fig. 1. Proposed Model
 IV. IMPLEMENTATION

Fig. 2. A sample of an Annotated Scenario•

TABLE1
Existing Named Entity Recognition (NER) taggers ACCURACY LEVELS OF THE ALGORITHMS
label words in a text which are the names of things such as
a person, company names. But not correctly tag the words Algorithm Class Precision Recall
into entities of the ER diagram. Currently, we have Entity 0.954 0.906
implemented the machine learning module to identify Random Forest
Attribute 0.989 0.743
some features of ER diagram such as entities, and Sub Entity 0.84 0.691
attributes. Phases of the implementation are as follows. Irrelevant 0.822 1.000
Entity 0.94 0.923
First, implement the pre-processing module by using Naive Bayes
Attribute 0.985 0.743
NLTK to preprocess the text in the scenarios – remove Sub Entity 1.000 0.164
punctuations, conversion to lowercase and tokenize to Irrelevant 0.822 1.000
Entity 0.958 0.822
sentences. Then, the machine learning module
Attribute 0.98 0.618
implemented by using supervised learning mechanism. Decision Table
Sub Entity 0.272 0.704
Fifty amounts of preprocessed requirement specifications Irrelevant 0.846 0.935
have been taken as the training corpus. Words of each and Entity 0.956 0.904
every specification in the corpus are annotated into an Attribute 0.975 0.748
SMO
entity, sub-entity, attribute, and irrelevant categories. For Sub Entity 0.849 0.664
the annotation purposes, used the “tagtog” API. It provides Irrelevant 0.854 0.999
automatic annotation into similar words appeared in the
text once we annotated single occurrence. The sample of
annotated requirement specification is shown in Fig. 2 VI. DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORKS
(Green color denotes the entity, orange color denotes the
subentity and pink color denotes the attributes). “Weka” When comparing the accuracy of the above
has been used as the machine learning tool to develop the algorithms all the algorithms have achieved a considerable
machine learning module to identify above-mentioned ER level of accuracy for the identification of the entity,
diagram features. We considered four classifiers namely attribute, and irrelevant classes. In the literature, it has
Random Forest, Naive Bayes, Decision Table, SMO when found that earlier researches were not used intelligence
training the “Weka” model. with this type of research. Therefore this attempt is the
V. EVALUATION approach with some intelligence to identify ER concepts
using NLP. Hence this is an initiation of this research
In order to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithms there are more future works such as increasing the
recall and precision calculation were used. Formulas of
accuracy of identifying entities, sub-entities and attributes
precision “(1)” and recall “(2)” are as follows.
using different algorithms, extend the model to identify
a-Number of relevant item of the ER diagram identified. relationships, relationship types, and cardinalities,
b-Number of relevant item of the ER diagram not implement the ER diagram drawing module to obtain the
identified. drawing of an ER diagram.
c-Number of an irrelevant item of the ER diagram
identified.
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