MAANA: An Automated Tool for DoMAin-Specific HANdling of Ambiguity

Abstract

MAANA (in Arabic: "meaning") is a tool for performingdomain-specific handling of ambiguity in requirements. Given a requirements document as input, MAANA detectsthe requirements that are potentially ambiguous. The focus ofMAANA is on coordination ambiguity and prepositional-phraseattachment ambiguity; these are two common ambiguity typesthat have been studied in the requirements engineering literature. To detect ambiguity, MAANA utilizes structural patterns anda set of heuristics derived from a domain-specific corpus. Thegenerated analysis file after running the tool can be reviewed byrequirements analysts. Through combining different knowledgesources, MAANA highlights also the requirements that mightcontain unacknowledged ambiguity. That is when the analystsunderstand different interpretations for the same requirement, without explicitly discussing it with the other analysts due to timeconstraints. This artifact paper presents the details of MAANA. MAANA is associated with the ICSE 2021 technical papertitled "Using Domain-specific Corpora for Improved Handlingof Ambiguity in Requirements". The tool is publicly available onGitHub and Zenodo.