Detecting system use cases and validations from documents

Identifying system use cases and corresponding validations involves analyzing large requirement documents to understand the descriptions of business processes, rules and policies. This consumes a significant amount of effort and time. We discuss an approach to automate the detection of system use cases and corresponding validations from documents. We have devised a representation that allows for capturing the essence of rule statements as a composition of atomic ‘Rule intents’ and key phrases associated with the intents. Rule intents that co-occur frequently constitute ‘Rule acts’ analogous to the Speech acts in Linguistics. Our approach is based on NLP techniques designed around this Rule Model. We employ syntactic and semantic NL analyses around the model to identify and classify rules and annotate them with Rule acts. We map the Rule acts to business process steps and highlight the combinations as potential system use cases and validations for human supervision.