Discourse Strategies Model: an initial phase for discovery of the fact-based statements from descriptive texts

Abstract

Fact-based conceptual modelling approaches seek, as one goal, to express detail about a universe of discourse (UoD) as elementary declarative statements, generalised from collections of data. A further resource available to the systems analyst, as the fact-modeller, is to discover fact-based statements from descriptive natural language information systems specifications. However, such extant formalised approaches as exist, that can assist the fact based analyst to process textual resources, are incomplete. This paper proposes a discourse strategies model, for use as an initial process for the fact-based analyst processing descriptive text. The model is synthesised from extant linguistic and fact-based modelling approaches represented in literature. The model proposed is exercised using an example descriptive text.