Abstract
In most current industrial software engineering projects, the majority
of requirements documents are written almost entirely in natural
language. However, specifying the requirements in natural language
has one major drawback, namely the inherent imprecision, i.e., ambiguity,
incompleteness, and inaccuracy, of natural language. Since the requirements
document forms the basis of the whole development process, such defects
can have severe consequences for the whole project. Therefore, it
is important to deal with these defects in a requirements specification
right from the start. This paper presents an approach for reducing
the problem of imprecision in natural language requirements specifications
with the use of natural language patterns, which allow formulating
requirements sentences in a less ambiguous, more complete, and more
accurate way. To ensure the applicability of our approach we based
our patterns on a metamodel for requirements statements for embedded
systems. With this metamodel, we ensure that all forms of requirements
statements are described with the patterns. We validated the effectiveness
of the patterns by using them to rewrite a substantial, previously
written, requirements specification to eliminate its imprecisions.
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