Multi-step Iterative Automated Domain Modeling with Large Language Models

Domain modeling, which represents the concepts and relationships in a problem domain, is an essential part of software engineering. As large language models (LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable ability in language understanding and generation, many approaches are designed to automate domain modeling with LLMs. However, these approaches usually formulate all input information to the LLM in a single step. Our previous single-step approach resulted in many missing modeling elements and advanced patterns. This paper introduces a novel framework designed to enhance fully automated domain model generation. The proposed multi-step automated domain modeling approach extracts model elements (e.g., classes, attributes, and relationships) from problem descriptions. The approach includes instructions and human knowledge in each step and uses an iterative process to identify complex patterns, repeatedly extracting the pattern from various instances and then synthesizing these extractions into a summarized overview. Furthermore, the framework incorporates a self-reflection mechanism. This mechanism assesses each generated model element, offering self-feedback for necessary modifications or removals, and integrates the domain model with the generated self-feedback. The proposed approach is assessed in experiments, comparing it with a baseline single-step approach from our earlier work. Experiments demonstrate a significant improvement over our earlier work, with a 22.71% increase in the F-1-score for identifying classes, 75.18% for relationships, and a 10.39% improvement for identifying the player-role pattern, with comparable performance for attributes. Our approach, dataset, and evaluation provide valuable insight for future research in automated LLM-based domain modeling.