Linguistic Analysis of Requirements of a Space Project and their Conformity with the Recommendations Proposed by a Controlled Natural Language

摘要

The long term aim of the project carried out by the French National SpaceAgency (CNES) is to design a writing guide based on the real and regularwriting of requirements. As a first step in the project, this paper proposes alin-guistic analysis of requirements written in French by CNES engineers. Theaim is to determine to what extent they conform to two rules laid down inINCOSE, a recent guide for writing requirements. Although CNES engineers arenot obliged to follow any Controlled Natural Language in their writing ofrequirements, we believe that language regularities are likely to emerge fromthis task, mainly due to the writers' experience. The issue is approached usingnatural language processing tools to identify sentences that do not comply withINCOSE rules. We further review these sentences to understand why therecommendations cannot (or should not) always be applied when specifyinglarge-scale projects.