Fuzziness and Ambiguity in Natural Language

Ambiguity in Natural Language Requirements Documents

Taming Ambiguity in Natural Language Requirements

One of the main tasks of requirements engineering (RE) is the creation of a requirements document that precisely, consistently, and completely describes the functional and non-functional properties of the system to be built. At some point during the RE process, the requirements are written down using a natural language or a requirements specification language. On one hand, natural language is f...

Identifying nocuous ambiguity in natural language requirements

This dissertation is an investigation into how ambiguity should be classified for authors and readers of text, and how this process can be automated. Usually, authors and readers disambiguate ambiguity, either consciously or unconsciously. However, disambiguation is not always appropriate. For instance, a linguistic construction may be read differently by different people, with no consensus abo...

Uncertainty and fuzziness: from natural language to argumentation models

Uncertainty and fuzziness pervade natural language both explicitly and implicitly. The explicit presence of uncertainty and fuzziness is exemplified by statements like "I believe that tomorrow will probably be a bit colder than today", while the presence of implicit uncertainty and/or fuzziness can be referred to background domain knowledge, e.g. in the statement "Tomorrow will be rainy because...

Ambiguity Management in Natural Language Generation

In natural language generation (NLG) it can be desirable to preserve some ambiguities rather than try to eliminate them. The question is, which ones are so liable to misinterpretation that they should be removed, and which can be allowed to remain. Our approach to the problem is to notify the user of an NLG system of ambiguities that might be present in generated text, and to advise him/her as ...