NATURAL LANGUAGE SPECIFICATION IMPROVEMENT WITH ONTOLOGIES
Sven J. Körner, Torben Brumm · International Journal of Semantic Computing · 2009
Requirements engineering can solve and cause many problems in a software development cycle. The difficulties in understanding and eliciting the desired functionality from the customer and then delivering the correct implementation of a software system lead to delays, mistakes, and high costs. Working with requirements means handling incomplete or faulty textual specifications. It is vital for a project to fully understand the purpose and the functionality of a software. The earlier specifications are corrected and improved, the better. We created a tool called RESI to support requirement analysts working with textual specifications. RESI checks for linguistic defects [1, 2] in specifications and offers a dialog-system which makes suggestions to improve the text. It points out to the user which parts of the specification are ambiguous, faulty or inaccurate and therefore need to be changed. For this task, RESI needs additional semantic information which is inherent to natural language specifications. It receives this information by utilizing ontologies.