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

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.