Abstract
Design patterns are good design solutions to recurring problems. Many works were interested in design patterns identification either for reverse engineering purposes, or for design improvement purposes. All existing approaches considered that a pattern is detected through both its structure and behavior, but no one considers the semantic aspect conveyed by the class and method names. In this paper, we propose a technique that exploits the semantic aspect to identify occurrences of a pattern in a design. In addition to the structural and behavioral analyses, the semantic analysis is very useful, specifically when there is a doubt between two design patterns having similar structures. By resolving a non deterministic identification, the identification precision increases.