A METHOD OF CONCEPT RECOGNITION IN COMMUNICATION SERVICE REQUIREMENT DESCRIPTIONS

Providers of communication services must be able to respond rapidly to the growing diversity of their customers' service needs as society be comes more dependent on information technologies. This responsiveness will be enhanced if the users themselves can define their service requ irements, ideally using natural language. The problem with natural lan guage expressions is their diversity, due to the various viewpoints fr om which they are written. Thus, we need a means of understanding the semantics of these diverse expressions. In the study outlined here, ai med at understanding the concepts in communication service requirement s written in natural language, the authors first clarify the factors c ausing diversity of expression. These are found to be combinations of three intersecting viewpoints, namely: the interfaces between the netw ork, terminals, and users; the viewpoint from both sides of each inter face; and the logical/physical information viewpoint. Next, the target domain of communication services is modeled from the standpoints of o peration procedures and functions, communication service concepts are systematized in terms of these models, and a communication service ont ology is constructed. Then a semantic recognition method is proposed b ased on a mapping between concepts and expressions. The effectiveness of the methodology is demonstrated by converting natural language desc riptions to formal language specifications. (C) 1997 Scripta Technica, Inc.