Abstract
This paper evaluates the potential contributions of natural language processing to requirements engineering. We present a selective history of the relationship between requirements engineering (RE) and natural-language processing (NLP), and briefly summarize relevant recent trends in NLP. The paper outlines basic issues in RE and how they relate to interactions between a NLP front end and system-development processes. We suggest some improvements to NLP that may be possible in the context of RE and conclude with an assessment of what should be done to improve likelihood of practical impact in this direction.
This work was supported in part by ARO under project P-45614-CI.
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
Luqi, Zhang, L., Berzins, V., Qiao, Y., Qiao, Y.: Documentation driven development for complex real-time systems. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 30(12), 936–952 (2004)
Luqi, Zhang, L.: Documentation driven development for complex systems. In: Proceedings of Workshop on Advances in Computer Science and Engineering, Berkeley, CA, pp. 141–170 (2006)
Stone, A., Sawyer, P.: Identifying tacit knowledge-based requirements. Software, IEE Proceedings 153(6), 211–218 (2006)
Kelly, D.F.: A software chasm: Software engineering and scientific computing. IEEE Software 24(6), 119–120 (2007)
Boehm, B.W.: Software Engineering Economics. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River (1981)
Balzer, R.: A 15 year perspective on automatic programming. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-11(11), 1257–1268 (1985)
Heidorn, G.E.: English as a very high level language for simulation programming. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Very high level languages, pp. 91–100. ACM Press, New York (1974)
Martin, W.A.: Some comments on eqs, a near term natural language data base query system. In: ACM 1978: Proceedings of the 1978 annual conference, pp. 156–164. ACM Press, New York (1978)
Hammer, M., Howe, W.G., Kruskal, V.J., Wladawsky, I.: A very high level programming language for data processing applications. Commun. ACM 20(11), 832–840 (1977)
Lu, R., Jin, Z., Wan, R.: Requirement specification in pseudo-natural language in promis. In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual InternationalComputer Software and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 1995, pp. 96–101 (1995)
Rolland, C., Proix, C.: A Natural Language Approach For Requirements Engineering. In: Loucopoulos, P. (ed.) CAiSE 1992. LNCS, vol. 593, pp. 257–277. Springer, Heidelberg (1992)
Kaindl, H.: The missing link in requirements engineering. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 18(2), 30–39 (1993)
Ryan, K.: The role of natural language in requirements engineering. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (1993)
Nanduri, S., Rugaber, S.: Requirements validation via automated natural language parsing. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, vol. 3, pp. 362–368 (1995)
Sleator, D., Temperley, D.: Parsing English with a link grammar. In: Proceeedings, Third International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, Tilburg, The Netherlands/Durbuy, Belgium (1993)
Ohnishi, A.: CARD: An environment for software requirements definition. In: Proceedings of APSEC, Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, pp. 420–429 (1995)
Ambriola, V., Gervasi, V.: Processing natural language requirements. In: 12th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp. 36–45 (1997)
Michael, J.B., Ong, V.L., Rowe, N.C.: Natural-language processing support for developing policy-governed software systems. In: 39th International Conference and Exhibition on Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems, TOOLS 39, pp. 263–274 (2001)
Denger, C., Berry, D.M., Kamsties, E.: Higher quality requirements specifications through natural language patterns. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Software: Science, Technology and Engineering, SwSTE 2003, pp. 80–90 (2003)
Durán, A., Ruiz, A., Bernárdez, B., Toro, M.: Verifying software requirements with xslt. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 27(1), 39–44 (2002)
Lee, B.-S., Bryant, B.R.: Automation of software system development using natural language processing and two-level grammar. In: Wirsing, M., Knapp, A., Balsamo, S. (eds.) RISSEF 2002. LNCS, vol. 2941, pp. 219–233. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Cheng, B.H.C., Atlee, J.M.: Research directions in requirements engineering. In: FOSE 2007: 2007 Future of Software Engineering, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 285–303. IEEE Computer Society (2007)
Luqi, Kordon, F.: Advances in requirements engineering: Bridging the gap between stakeholders’ needs and formal designs. In: Paech, B., Martell, C. (eds.) Monterey Workshop 2007. LNCS, vol. 5320, pp. 15–24. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Iwanska, L., Zadrozny, W.: Introduction to the special issue on context in natural language processing. Computational Intelligence 13(3), 301–308 (1997)
Hwa, R.: Supervised grammar induction using training data with limited constituent information. In: Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics, Morristown, NJ, USA, pp. 73–79. Association for Computational Linguistics (1999)
Steedman, M., Hwa, R., Clark, S., Osborne, M., Sarkar, A., Hockenmaier, J., Ruhlen, P., Baker, S., Crim, J.: Example selection for bootstrapping statistical parsers. In: NAACL 2003: Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technology, pp. 157–164. Association for Computational Linguistics, Morristown, NJ, USA (2003)
Xi, C., Hwa, R.: A backoff model for bootstrapping resources for non-english languages. In: HLT 2005: Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 851–858. Association for Computational Linguistics, Morristown, NJ, USA (2005)
McClosky, D., Charniak, E., Johnson, M.: Effective self-training for parsing. In: Proceedings of the main conference on Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics, pp. 152–159. Association for Computational Linguistics, Morristown, NJ, USA (2006)
Steedman, M., Osborne, M., Sarkar, A., Clark, S., Hwa, R., Hockenmaier, J., Ruhlen, P., Baker, S., Crim, J.: Bootstrapping statistical parsers from small datasets. In: Proceedings of EACL 2003, Budapest, Hungary, pp. 331–338 (2003)
Charniak, E.: Statistical techniques for natural language parsing. AI Magazine 18(4), 33–44 (1997)
van Halteren, H., Zavrel, J., Daelemans, W.: Improving accuracy in wordclass tagging through combination of machine learning systems. In: Proceedings of the ANLP-NAACL, Seattle, Washington, Morgan Kaufman (2000)
Collins, M.: Three generative, lexicalized models for statistical parsing. In: Cohen, P.R., Wahlster, W. (eds.) Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Eighth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Somerset, New Jersey, pp. 16–23. Association for Computational Linguistics (1997)
Collins, M.: Discriminative reranking for natural language parsing. In: ICML 2000: Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 175–182. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (2000)
Mihalcea, R.: Knowledge Based Methods for Word Sense Disambiguation. In: Word Sense Disambiguation: Algorithms, Applications, and Trends. Kluwer, Dordrecht (2006)
Mihalcea, R.: Unsupervised large-vocabulary word sense disambiguation with graph-based algorithms for sequence data labeling. In: HLT 2005: Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 411–418. Association for Computational Linguistics, Morristown, NJ, USA (2005)
Miller, G.A., Beckwith, R., Fellbaum, C., Gross, D., Miller, K.J.: Introduction to WordNet: An on-line lexical database. International Journal of Lexicography 3(4), 235–244 (1990)
Levin, B.: English Verb Classes and Alternations: a preliminary investigation, Chicago and London. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1993)
Berzins, V., Luqi: Software engineering with abstractions. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA (1991)
Plummer, S.: Memorandum: Awareness of human-systems integration (HSI) in Air Force acquisitions (2000)
Blasch, E.: Assembling a distributed fused information-based human-computer cognitive decision making tool. Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine 15(5), 11–17 (2000)
Helbig, H.: Knowledge Representation and the Semantics of Natural Language. Springer, Berlin (2006)
Hartstrumpf, S.: Coreference resolution with syntactico-semantic rules and corpus statistics. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Computational Natural Language Learning Workshop (CoNLL-2001), Toulouse, France, pp. 137–144 (2001)
Jurafsky, D., Martin, J.H.: Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River (2000)
Manning, C.D., SchĂĽtze, H.: Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Massachusetts. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)
Luqi: Transforming documents to evolve high-confidence systems. In: Proceedings of Workshop on Advances in Computer Science and Engineering, Berkeley, CA, pp. 71–72 (2006)
Erk, K., Pado, S.: Shalmaneser - a flexible toolbox for semantic role assignment. In: Proceedings of LREC 2006, Genoa, Italy (2006)
Ge, N., Hale, J., Charniak, E.: A statistical approach to anaphora resolution. In: Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Very Large Corpora, pp. 161–170 (1998)
Merialdo, B.: Tagging english text with a probabilistic model. Computational Linguistics 20(2), 155–171 (1994)
Kupiec, J.: Robust part-of-speech tagging using a hidden markov model. Computer Speech and Language 6, 225–242 (1992)
Marcus, M.P., Santorini, B., Marcinkiewicz, M.A.: Building a large annotated corpus of english: The penn treebank. Computational Linguistics 19(2), 313–330 (1994)
Hwa, R., Osborne, M., Sarkar, A., Steedman, M.: Corrected co-training for statistical parsers. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on the Continuum from Labeled to Unlabeled Data in Machine Learning and Data Mining, International Conference of Machine Learning, Washington, DC (2003)
Lee, B.S.: Automated conversion from a requirements document to an executable formal specification. In: Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2001, p. 437 (2001)
Ruth, G.R.: Automatic programming: Automating the software system development process. In: ACM 1977: Proceedings of the 1977 annual conference, pp. 174–180. ACM Press, New York (1977)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Berzins, V., Martell, C., Luqi, Adams, P. (2008). Innovations in Natural Language Document Processing for Requirements Engineering. In: Paech, B., Martell, C. (eds) Innovations for Requirement Analysis. From Stakeholders’ Needs to Formal Designs. Monterey Workshop 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5320. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89778-1_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89778-1_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-89777-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-89778-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)