Transforming natural language into controlled language in requirements elicitation: a pre-conceptual-schema-based conceptual synthesis

Abstract

During  the  requirements  elicitation  process,  a  group  of  analysts  and stakeholders  identify,  capture,  and  integrate  requirements.  Textual  or graphic   descriptions   capturing   the   most   relevant   concepts   from   the   domain of a software application development are generated. Commonly, the  initial  phases—identifying  and  capturing  requirements  expressed  in natural language—are executed by using techniques in which high analyst intervention and comprehensive knowledge of the context and the problem domain are required. Thus, a subjective, ambiguous, and error-prone process is  implied,  causing  losses  in  the  generation  of  the  initial  domain  models  (specified in a controlled language). In this paper we provide a synthesis of trends  and  conceptual  approaches  found  in  the  state  of  the  art  concerning  the  natural  language  transformation  into  controlled  language  during  the  requirements elicitation process. Finally, we propose a pre-conceptual schema for representing the conceptual framework of the transformation process.