A Method for Controlling the Production of Specifications in Natural Language
Brandon Richard Macias, Stephen Pulman · The Computer Journal · 1995
Before a system can be formally defined, it is common to write a specification in a natural language as the basis for the formal definition. Natural languages are not well suited for this task; documentation written in a natural language is often ambiguous and imprecise. Inspection of real documentation also reveals that, without special training, most writers do not produce concise, clear or consistent statements. We present here an experimental interface to a general-purpose natural-language processing system designed to control the writing of specification statements in a natural language. The interface is designed to reduce the degree of imprecision and ambiguity in the natural-language statements, as well as contributing to the writing of shorter statements, with clear structure and punctuation. We compare our approach to similar work in this area.