DKSE: Automated Extraction of Structured Domain Ontologies from Software Requirement Documents via Large Language Models

Abstract

Abstract Software requirement documents—natural-language specifications that define a system’s entities, rules, processes, and interfaces—remain the core knowledge artifact in enterprise software development. Yet they remain inaccessible to automated tooling: downstream tasks like test generation, code scaffolding, compliance checking, and AI-assisted development cannot directly process unstructured prose. We present DKSE (Domain Knowledge Structuring Engine), a tool that automatically converts requirement documents into machine-readable structured ontologies organized around six core asset types: entities, relations, rules, processes, APIs, and dictionaries. DKSE uses an LLM-guided extraction pipeline that accepts multi-format inputs (DOCX, PDF, HTML), outputs YAML-encoded ontologies with full provenance tracing back to source sections, and includes built-in quality assurance tooling for validation, version diffing, and probe generation. In a case study across four banking sub-domains, we ran DKSE on six requirement documents totaling roughly 800,000 Chinese characters. It extracted 3,439 structured assets: 215 entities, 1,227 rules, 739 relations, 182 processes, 482 dictionaries, and 594 APIs. Expert review confirmed full functional-module coverage, with 96% of a stratified sample rated fully accurate and zero hallucinated assets. We validate DKSE’s practical value through three downstream use cases: automated benchmark generation (1,214 machine-graded probes), domain-specific LLM training corpus construction, and knowledge graph ingestion for retrieval-augmented generation. DKSE is built in Rust (~8,000 lines of code) and shipped as a CLI tool with an accompanying web interface. We position this work as a proof-of-concept within a single industry (Chinese banking), not a general-purpose validation. Quantitative evaluation across additional domains, languages, and against baseline extraction methods is left for future work.