Processing natural language software requirement specifications

Abstract

Ambiguity in requirement specifications causes numerous problems; for example in defining customer/supplier contracts, ensuring the integrity of safety-critical systems, and analysing the implications of system change requests. A direct appeal to formal specification has not solved these problems, partly because of the restrictiveness and lack of habitability of formal languages. An alternative approach, described in this paper, is to use natural language processing (NLP) techniques to aid the development of formal descriptions from requirements expressed in controlled natural language. While many problems in NLP remain unsolved, we show that suitable extensions to existing tools provide a useful platform for detecting and resolving ambiguities. Our system is demonstrated through a case-study on a simple requirements specification.