A REQUIREMENT DESCRIPTION APPROACH IN NATURAL-LANGUAGE BASED ON COMMUNICATION SERVICE KNOWLEDGE

This paper proposes a requirement description and elicitation approach for communication services. Requirements are described in natural lan guage, refined with a knowledge base, and converted to a formal langua ge for program generation. A model for communication services is made as a set of three items: terminal state, terminal action and the respo nse of the communication system to the action. This set, in turn, corr esponds to natural language syntax that expresses two conditions (term inal state and action) and their result. These conditions and result a re expressed as a sequence of simple sentences that describe the relat ionship between a terminal and a communication system. Thus, by defini ng such a description style to reflect the features of communication s ervices, it should be possible to achieve both a high level of descrip tion and mechanical processing capabilities at the same time. However, requirement descriptions usually include omission and inconsistency. This problem cannot be solved by merely introducing natural language f or the descriptions. Knowledge about the target domain of requirements is needed to resolve it. This paper reports on a knowledge base that stores constraints existing between conditions and results in communic ation services. This knowledge base is shown to be effective in supple menting omissions and resolving inconsistency. This paper also present s a technique for converting the elicited requirements in natural lang uage to descriptions in a formal language that can be used to generate a program.