A methodology supporting syntactic, lexical and semantic clarification of requirements in systems engineering

François Christophe, Faisal Mokammel, Eric Coatanéa, An Nguyen, Mohamed Bakhouya and Alain Bernard

International Journal of Product Development, 2014, vol. 19, issue 4, 173-190

Abstract: Product development is a challenging activity. The process begins with a description and representation of a design problem in form of a requirements document. It involves two phases: elicitation by description in Natural Language (NL) and clarification of the description. NL implies interpretation of terms within a context to avoid later misunderstanding. The paper proposes a methodology to elicit and refine the initial needs. The elicitation is done by finding support information from several sources such as patent databases, encyclopaedias and commercial websites. The refinement supported by a computer-based approach is done on different levels (grammar, words and context selection) to reduce the ambiguity of the requirements descriptions. The initial description is refined by an automatic questioning process. This is followed by an assisted search and selection of answers from different web-based sources. Relevant answers are selected using a similarity metric. A case study is used to demonstrate the approach.

Keywords: early design process; requirements engineering; syntactic clarification; lexical clarification; semantic clarification; product development; natural language processing; NLP; data mining; patent databases; encyclopaedias; commercial websites; ambiguity; automatic questioning; assisted search; similarity metrics. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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