Technical reports

Natural-language processing and requirements specifications

Benjamín Macías, Stephen G. Pulman

July 1995, 73 pages

Abstract

This document reports on our participation in the MORSE (“A Method for Object Reuse in Safety-critical Environments”) project. Our brief in the project was to investigate the role that natural-language processing (NLP) techniques can play in improving any of the aspects linking natural-language requirements specifications and formal specifications. The contents are as follows: We begin with a brief introduction to NLP in the context of requirements tasks, followed by an examination of some strategies to control the form of requirements specifications. We continue by describing an interface designed to correct some of the problems with known methods to control specifications, while employing current NLP to maximum advantage. We then show how to build a natural-langauge interface to a formal specification, and some aspects of the problem of paraphrasing formal expressions. We finish with the conclusions reached at the end of our participation in the project.

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-373,
  author =	 {Mac{\'\i}as, Benjam{\'\i}n and Pulman, Stephen G.},
  title = 	 {{Natural-language processing and requirements
         	   specifications}},
  year = 	 1995,
  month = 	 jul,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-373.pdf},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-373},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-373}
}