Processing natural language requirements

Abstract

The importance of requirements, which in practice often means natural language requirements, for a successful software project cannot be underestimated. Although requirement analysis has been traditionally reserved to the experience of professionals, there is no reason not to use various automatic techniques to the same end. In this paper we present Circe, a Web-based environment for aiding in natural language requirements gathering, elicitation, selection, and validation and the tools it integrates. These tools have been used in several experiments both in academic and in industrial environments. Among other features, Circe can extract abstractions from natural language texts, build various models of the system described by the requirements, check the validity of such models, and produce functional metric reports. The environment can be easily extended to enhance its natural language recognition power or to add new models and views on them.