Linguistic Analysis of Requirements of a Space Project and their Conformity with the Recommendations Proposed by a Controlled Natural Language
This work addresses the problem of improving requirement writing for space project engineers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing guidelines without introducing new methods.
The paper analyzed French requirements from CNES engineers to assess their conformity with INCOSE guidelines, finding that language regularities emerge from experience, and used NLP tools to identify non-compliant sentences to understand limitations of applying recommendations in large-scale projects.
The long term aim of the project carried out by the French National Space Agency (CNES) is to design a writing guide based on the real and regular writing of requirements. As a first step in the project, this paper proposes a lin-guistic analysis of requirements written in French by CNES engineers. The aim is to determine to what extent they conform to two rules laid down in INCOSE, a recent guide for writing requirements. Although CNES engineers are not obliged to follow any Controlled Natural Language in their writing of requirements, we believe that language regularities are likely to emerge from this task, mainly due to the writers' experience. The issue is approached using natural language processing tools to identify sentences that do not comply with INCOSE rules. We further review these sentences to understand why the recommendations cannot (or should not) always be applied when specifying large-scale projects.