On the automatization of database conceptual modelling through linguistic engineering

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show an approach to database (DB) conceptual modelling that takes advantage of lexical knowledge (morphologic, syntactic and semantic) in order to (semi) automatically interpret a textual description of an Universe of Discourse (UoD) and to propose a feasible data conceptual schema according to the natural language (NL) description. Main contributions of the present work are: definition of several linguistic perspectives based on syntactic and semantic clues that help to acquire Extended Entity Relationship (EER) conceptual schemata from textual specifications, specification of a grammar for the EER conceptual model, as well as a set of correspondence rules among linguistic concepts and the EER model constructors.