Computer Assisted Integration of Domain-Specific Modeling Languages Using Text Analysis Techniques

Following the principle of separation of concerns, the Model-driven Engineering field has developed Domain-Specific Modeling Languages DSML to address the increasing complexity of the systems design. In this context of heterogeneous modeling languages, engineers and language designers are facing the critical problem of language integration. To address this problem, instead of doing a syntactic analysis based on the domain models or metamodels as it is common practice today, we propose to adopt natural language processing techniques to do a semantic analysis of the language specifications. We evaluate empirically our approach on seven real test cases and compare our results with five state of the art tools. Results show that the semantic analysis of textual descriptions that accompany DSMLs can efficiently assist engineers to make well-informed integration choices.