CNL-ER: A Controlled Natural Language for Specifying and Verbalising Entity Relationship Models

The first step towards designing an information system is conceptual modelling where domain experts and knowledge engineers identify the necessary information together to build an information system. Entity relationship modelling is one of the most popular conceptual modelling techniques that represents an information system in terms of entities, attributes and relationships. Entity relationship models are constructed graphically but are often difficult to understand by domain experts. To overcome this problem, we suggest to verbalise these models in a controlled natural language. In this paper, we present CNL-ER, a controlled natural language for specifying and verbalising entity relationship (ER) models that not only solves the verbalisation problem for these models but also provides the benefits of automatic verification and validation, and semantic round-tripping which makes the communication process transparent between the domain experts and the knowledge engineers.