The formalism establishes the rules to generate the internal representation of both queries and natural language descriptions of software components. The formalism consists of a case system for simple imperative sentences with some constraints and heuristics that are used to map a description into a frame-like internal representation. The case system basically consists of a sequence of one or more semantic cases. Semantic cases are associated to some syntactic compounds of an imperative sentence.
Semantic cases show how noun phrases are semantically related to the verb in a sentence.
We have defined a basic set of semantic cases for software descriptions by analysing the short descriptions of Unix commands in manual pages. A case generator reveals the presence of a particular semantic case in a sentence. Case generators are mainly prepositions. The analysis of the descriptions This is a section of a local copy of the paper A Similarity Measure for Retrieving Software Artifacts by M. R. Girardi and B. Ibrahim .