The Use of Semantic Heuristics in the Automation of ER Modelling

Abstract

This paper proposes the use of heuristics gained from the syntactic and semantic knowledge in natural language specifications for the production of ER models. The application of both syntactic and semantic heuristics are used as the strategy to obtain the relevant ER elements such as entities, attributes and relationships from the specifications. Earlier research has shown that syntactic heuristics produced good results in identifying the relevant and correct results of the ER elements in terms of recall and precision. Preliminary results show that the use of the semantic heuristics may help to further improve the results in the automatic detection of the ER elements. The semantic heuristics may later be implemented as part of a natural language tool in the generation of the ER models.