Expanding Normalized Systems from textual domain descriptions using TEMOS
Authors
Year
2022
Published
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems. 2022, 59(2), 391-414. ISSN 0925-9902.
Type
Article
Departments
Annotation
Functional requirements on a software system are traditionally captured as text that describes the expected functionality in the domain of a real-world system. Natural language processing methods allow us to extract the knowledge from such requirements and transform it, e.g., into a model. Moreover, these methods can improve the quality of the requirements, which usually suffer from ambiguity, incompleteness, and inconsistency. This paper presents a novel approach to using natural language processing. We use the method of grammatical inspection to find specific patterns in the description of functional requirement specifications (written in English). Then, we transform the requirements into a model of Normalized Systems elements. This may realize a possible component of the eagerly awaited text-to-software pipeline. The input of this method is represented by textual requirements. Its output is a running prototype of an information system created using Normalized Systems (NS) techniques. Therefore, the system is ready to accept further enhancements, e.g., custom code fragments, in an evolvable manner ensured by compliance with the NS principles. A demonstration of pipeline implementation is also included in this paper. The text processing part of our pipeline extends the existing pipeline implemented in our system TEMOS, where we propose and implement methods of checking the quality of textual requirements concerning ambiguity, incompleteness, and inconsistency.
Problem of Inconsistency and Default Consistency Rules
Authors
Šenkýř, D.; Kroha, P.
Year
2021
Published
New Trends in Intelligent Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2021. p. 674-687. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. vol. 337. ISSN 0922-6389. ISBN 978-1-64368-194-8.
Type
Proceedings paper
Departments
Annotation
We investigate inconsistency problem in textual functional requirements specifications. We argue that some sources of inconsistency can be revealed during the very first steps of textual requirements analysis. In this paper, we focus on those facts and rules that domain experts find so obvious that they do not even mention them to the analysts during the discussions about the product to be constructed. However, what is very obvious for stakeholders may not be obvious for analysts. We call such rules default consistency rules. We argue that the lack of the default consistency rules leads to incompleteness in the requirements, and it causes inconsistency with all its unpleasant consequences. In this contribution, we describe our approach to the problem of how the missing information can be both identified in the original requirements and found in external sources. We show a motivational example and explain our method.
Problem of Semantic Enrichment of Sentences Used in Textual Requirements Specification
Authors
Šenkýř, D.; Kroha, P.
Year
2021
Published
Advanced Information Systems Engineering Workshops. Springer, Cham, 2021. p. 69-80. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. vol. 423. ISSN 1865-1348. ISBN 978-3-030-79021-9.
Type
Proceedings paper
Departments
Annotation
In this paper, we describe our graph-oriented method used to find semantically similar sentences in external information sources that have a semantic enrichment potential in relation to sentences of textual functional requirements specification. Our motivation is to reduce the incompleteness of requirements that may be a source of inconsistency. We found there are some facts and rules so obvious for domain experts that they do not even mention them in requirements. We call such rules default consistency rules. These rules are often not implemented and can not be revealed from the requirements because they are not mentioned there.
Patterns for Checking Incompleteness of Scenarios in Textual Requirements Specification
Authors
Šenkýř, D.; Kroha, P.
Year
2020
Published
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering. Porto: SciTePress - Science and Technology Publications, 2020. p. 289-296. ISSN 2184-4895. ISBN 978-989-758-421-3.
Type
Proceedings paper
Departments
Annotation
In this contribution, we investigate the incompleteness problem in textual requirements specifications. Missing alternative scenarios are one of the incompleteness sources, i.e., descriptions of processing in the cases when something runs in another way as expected. We check the text of requirements specification using linguistic patterns, and we try to reveal scenarios and alternative scenarios. After that process is finished, we decide whether the set of alternative scenarios is complete. As a result, we generate warning messages. We illustrate our approach with examples.
Problem of Incompleteness in Textual Requirements Specification
Authors
Šenkýř, D.; Kroha, P.
Year
2019
Published
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Software Technologies. Porto: SciTePress - Science and Technology Publications, 2019. p. 323-330. ISBN 978-989-758-379-7.
Type
Proceedings paper
Departments
Annotation
In this contribution, we investigate the incompleteness problem in textual requirements specifications. Incompleteness is a typical problem that arises when stakeholders (e.g., domain experts) hold some information for generally known, and they do not mention it to the analyst. A model based on the incomplete requirements suffers from missing objects, properties, or relationships as we show in an illustrating example. Our presented methods are based on grammatical inspection, semantic networks (ConceptNet and BabelNet), and pre-configured data from on-line dictionaries. Additionally, we show how a domain model has to be used to reveal some missing parts of it. Our experiments have shown that the precision of our methods is about 60–82 %.
Patterns of Ambiguity in Textual Requirements Specification
Authors
Šenkýř, D.; Kroha, P.
Year
2019
Published
New Knowledge in Information Systems and Technologies. Springer, Cham, 2019. p. 886-895. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. vol. 1. ISSN 2194-5357. ISBN 978-3-030-16180-4.
Type
Proceedings paper
Departments
Annotation
In this contribution, we investigate the ambiguity problem in textual requirements specifications. We focused on the structural ambiguity and extracted some patterns to indicate this kind of ambiguity. We show that the standard methods of linguistics are not enough in some cases, and we describe a class of ambiguity caused by coreference that needs an underlying domain model or a knowledge base to be solved. Part of our implemented solution is a cooperation of our tool TEMOS with the Prolog inference machine working with facts and rules acquired from OCL conditions of the domain model.
Patterns in Textual Requirements Specification
Authors
Šenkýř, D.; Kroha, P.
Year
2018
Published
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies. Madeira: SciTePress, 2018. p. 197-204. vol. 1. ISBN 978-989-758-320-9.
Type
Proceedings paper
Departments
Annotation
In this paper, we investigate methods of grammatical inspection to identify patterns in textual requirements specification. Unfortunately, a text in natural language includes additionally many inaccuracies caused by ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness. Our contribution is that using our patterns, we are able to extract the information from the text that is necessary to fix some of the problems mentioned above. We present our
implemented tool TEMOS that is able to detect some inaccuracies in a text and to generate fragments of the UML class model from textual requirements specification. We use external on-line resources to complete the textual information of requirements.