Paraphrasing as a Technique to Support Object-oriented Analysis

The goal of the information analysis process is to derive the information grammar which describes the communication language within some application domain. This process involves both domain experts and system analysts. Since good communication between these two partners is essential, a proper common language should be chosen. Natural language seems to be a good candidate for this purpose. Two essential activities of the analysis process are modeling the application domain, and validating the resulting models. In this paper the focus is on validation. We consider object-oriented analysis models and paraphrase them by sentences in natural language. The paraphrasing process is automatically supported by the Grammar Workbench using the AGFL formalism to describe the information grammar. This results in a prototype for paraphrasing analysis models.