A system for the semiautomatic generation of E-R models from natural language specifications

Techniques that allow a program to generate E-R models for small application domains are described. The inputs to the program are natural language specifications. The program consists of two major components: a natural language understander and an E-R generator. The paper describes briefly the knowledge representation structures constructed by the natural language understander, and, then, explains the E-R generator in detail. The E-R generator consists of two kinds of rules: specific rules linked to the semantics of some words in the sentences, and generic rules that identify ER-entities and ER-relationships on the basis of the logical form of the sentence and on the basis of the ER-entities and ER-relationships under construction. The program has been tested on a set of database problems. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved