Abstract
Requirements engineering, the first phase of any software development project, is the Achilles’ heel of the whole development process, as requirements documents are often inconsistent and incomplete. In industrial requirements documents natural language is the main presentation means. In such documents the system behavior is specified in the form of use cases and their scenarios, written as a sequence of sentences in natural language. For the authors of requirements documents some facts are so obvious that they forget to mention them. This surely causes problems for the requirements analyst.
Missing information manifests itself, for example, in sentences in passive voice: such sentences just say that some action is performed, but they do not say who performs the action. In the case of requirement analysis this poses a serious problem, as in every real system there is an actor for every performed action.
There already exists an approach able to guess missing actors and actions. However, the existing approach is able to handle sentences containing exactly one verb only. The approach presented in this paper extends the existing one by treatment of compound sentences and passive voice. Feasibility of the presented approach to the treatment of passive and conjunctions was confirmed in a case study.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Mich, L., Franch, M., Novi Inverardi, P.: Market research on requirements analysis using linguistic tools. Requirements Engineering 9, 40–56 (2004)
Rupp, C.: Requirements-Engineering und -Management. Professionelle, iterative Anforderungsanalyse für die Praxis. 2nd edn. Hanser–Verlag, ISBN 3-446-21960-9 (2002)
Buhr, K., Heumesser, N., Houdek, F., Omasreiter, H., Rothermehl, F., Tavakoli, R., Zink, T.: DaimlerChrysler demonstrator: System specification instrument cluster (2004) (accessed 11.01.2007), http://www.empress-itea.org/deliverables/D5.1_Appendix_B_v1.0_Public_Version.pdf
Kof, L.: Scenarios: Identifying missing objects and actions by means of computational linguistics. In: Contribution to the 15th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (2007)
Grosz, B.J., Joshi, A.K., Weinstein, S.: Centering: A framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics 21, 203–225 (1995)
Ratnaparkhi, A.: A maximum entropy model for part-of-speech tagging. In: Brill, E., Church, K., eds.: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics, Somerset, New Jersey, pp. 133–142 (1996)
Kof, L.: Text Analysis for Requirements Engineering. PhD thesis, Technische Universitaet Muenchen (2005)
Porter, M.: An algorithm for suffix stripping. Program 14, 130–137 (1980) (accessed 14.07.2003), http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/
Fabbrini, F., Fusani, M., Gnesi, S., Lami, G.: The linguistic approach to the natural language requirements quality: benefit of the use of an automatic tool. In: 26th Annual NASA Goddard Software Engineering Workshop, pp. 97–105. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2001)
Kamsties, E., Berry, D.M., Paech, B.: Detecting ambiguities in requirements documents using inspections. In: Workshop on Inspections in Software Engineering, Paris, France, pp. 68–80 (2001)
Goldin, L., Berry, D.M.: AbstFinder, a prototype natural language text abstraction finder for use in requirements elicitation. Automated Software Eng. 4, 375–412 (1997)
Abbott, R.J.: Program design by informal English descriptions. Communications of the ACM 26, 882–894 (1983)
Ambriola, V., Gervasi, V.: The Circe approach to the systematic analysis of NL requirements. Technical Report TR-03-05, University of Pisa, Dipartimento di Informatica (2003)
Rolland, C., Ben Achour, C.: Guiding the construction of textual use case specifications. Data. & Knowledge Engineering Journal 25, 125–160 (1998)
Díaz, I., Pastor, O., Matteo, A.: Modeling interactions using role-driven patterns. In: RE 2005. Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE 2005), Washington, DC, USA,, pp. 209–220. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2005)
Vadera, S., Meziane, F.: From English to formal specifications. The Computer Journal 37, 753–763 (1994)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kof, L. (2007). Treatment of Passive Voice and Conjunctions in Use Case Documents. In: Kedad, Z., Lammari, N., Métais, E., Meziane, F., Rezgui, Y. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4592. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73351-5_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73351-5_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-73350-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-73351-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)