Addressing Lexical and Semantic Ambiguity in Natural Language Requirements

Abstract

Ambiguity is a critical problem that rears its ugly head in many disciplines including writing, philosophy, law, and of course software engineering, especially requirements engineering. Requirements are typically expressed in a natural language. However, expressions in natural languages are likely to suffer from ambiguities, where a statement can be reasonably interpreted in more than one way and if we know, even then it is difficult to decide which one is correct. This paper presents an approach for ambiguity detection and resolution in natural language requirements as early as possible using natural language processing and semantic web techniques. Hence, we will be able to identify the ambiguous words and provide them all the possible interpretation and clarifying the meaning of the requirements.