A Natural Language Approach for Requirements Engineering

The term Requirements Engineering refers to this part of a database development cycle that involves investigating the problems and requirements of the users community and developing a conceptual specification of the future system. Natural language plays an important role during this stage that has proved to be crucial in the development of computerized systems. The required acquisition of application domain knowledge is achieved either through documents and texts analysis or by means of interviews i.e through language manipulation. Similarly validation of the specification is made via oral discussions with users. The paper proposes that Requirements Engineering (R.E) should be supported by a CASE tool based on a linguistic approach. It presents a R.E support environment that generates the conceptual specification from a description of the problem space provided through natural language statements. Complementary, validation is based on texts generation from the conceptual specification to natural language. The paper focusses on the linguistic approach, demonstrates its generality and overviews its implementation in a CASE tool.