Analysis of Specification in Japanese Using Natural Language Processing.

A requirement specification for software is usually described in a natural language and thus may include sentences containing ambiguity and contradiction. Problems due to the ambiguity often occur at the stage of the verification process of software development, and this forces developers to go back to the design process again. In order to prevent this kind of rework, a method of automatically converting a required specification written in Japanese to a state transition model is desired to help detect ambiguity and contradiction points of the specification. This paper proposes a method for this purpose, and reports on the result of applying the method to a specification example of an electric pot.