Automatic Detection of Ambiguous Terminology for Software Requirements

Identifying ambiguous requirements is an important aspect of software development, as it prevents design and implementation errors that are costly to correct. Unfortunately, few efforts have been made to automatically solve the problem. In this paper, we study the problem of lexical ambiguity detection and propose methods that can automatically identify potentially ambiguous concepts in software requirement specifications. Specifically, we focus on two types of lexical ambiguities, i.e., Overloaded and Synonymous ambiguity. Experiment results over four real-world software requirement collections show that the proposed methods are effective in detecting ambiguous terminology.