Nominalizations in Requirements Engineering Natural Language Models

Abstract

It is a usual practice to use natural language in any document intended for clients and users in the requirements engineering process of a software development. This facilitates the comprehension of the requirements engineer's proposals to clients and users. However, natural language introduces some drawbacks, such as ambiguity and incompleteness, which attempt against a good comprehension of those documents. Glossaries help by reducing ambiguity, though they introduce their own linguistic weaknesses. The nominalization of verbs is one of them. There are sometimes appreciable differences between using a verb form or its nominal form, while in other cases they may be synonyms. Therefore, the requirements engineer must be aware of the precise meaning of each term used in the application domain, in order to correctly define them and properly use them in every document. In this chapter, guidelines about treatment of verb nominalization are given when constructing a specific glossary, called Language Extended Lexicon.