Classification of UML Diagrams to Support Software Engineering Education

There is a huge necessity for tools that implement accessibility in Software Engineering (SE) education. The use of diagrams to teach software development is a very common practice, and there are a lot of UML diagrams represented as images in didactic materials that need an accessible version for visually impaired or blind students. Machine learning techniques, such as deep learning, can be used to automate this task. The practical application of deep learning in many classification problems in the context of SE is problematic due to the large volumes of labeled data required for training. Transfer learning techniques can help in this type of task by taking advantage of pre-trained models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), so that better results may be achieved even with few images. In this work, we applied transfer learning and data augmentation for UML diagrams classification on a dataset specially created for the development of this work, containing six types of UML diagrams. The dataset was also made available as a contribution of this work. We experimented three widely-known CNN architectures: VGG16, RestNet50, and InceptionV3. The results demonstrated that the use of transfer learning contributes for achieving good results even using scarce data. However, there is still a room for improvement regarding the successful classification of the UML diagrams addressed in this work.