research-article

Automatic detection of nocuous coordination ambiguities in natural language requirements

Authors:

Alistair Willis,

Bashar NuseibehAuthors Info & Claims

ASE '10: Proceedings of the 25th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

Pages 53 - 62

https://doi.org/10.1145/1858996.1859007

Published: 20 September 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Natural language is prevalent in requirements documents. However, ambiguity is an intrinsic phenomenon of natural language, and is therefore present in all such documents. Ambiguity occurs when a sentence can be interpreted differently by different readers. In this paper, we describe an automated approach for characterizing and detecting so-called nocuous ambiguities, which carry a high risk of misunderstanding among different readers. Given a natural language requirements document, sentences that contain specific types of ambiguity are first extracted automatically from the text. A machine learning algorithm is then used to determine whether an ambiguous sentence is nocuous or innocuous, based on a set of heuristics that draw on human judgments, which we collected as training data. We implemented a prototype tool for Nocuous Ambiguity Identification (NAI), in order to illustrate and evaluate our approach. The tool focuses on coordination ambiguity. We report on the results of a set of experiments to assess the performance and usefulness of the approach.

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Cited By

Althunibat AAlsawareah BMaidin SHawashin BJebril IZaqaibeh BAl-khawaja H(2024)Detecting Ambiguities in Requirement Documents Written in Arabic Using Machine Learning AlgorithmsInternational Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing10.4018/IJCAC.33956314:1(1-19)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/IJCAC.339563
C P(2024)Requirements Copilot: Ambiguity Management in Feature Requests2024 IEEE 32nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)10.1109/RE59067.2024.00069(517-519)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/RE59067.2024.00069
Kato TMasuda STsuda K(2024)Design and construction of requirement specifications ambiguity detection support method2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)10.1109/ICSTW60967.2024.00033(109-115)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTW60967.2024.00033
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Index Terms

Automatic detection of nocuous coordination ambiguities in natural language requirements
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Requirements analysis

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ASE '10: Proceedings of the 25th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

September 2010

534 pages

ISBN:9781450301169

DOI:10.1145/1858996

General Chair:
Charles Pecheur
Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
,
Program Chairs:
Jamie Andrews
University of Western Ontario, Canada
,
Elisabetta Di Nitto
Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 20 September 2010

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ASE10: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

September 20 - 24, 2010

Antwerp, Belgium

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Overall Acceptance Rate 82 of 337 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

Althunibat AAlsawareah BMaidin SHawashin BJebril IZaqaibeh BAl-khawaja H(2024)Detecting Ambiguities in Requirement Documents Written in Arabic Using Machine Learning AlgorithmsInternational Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing10.4018/IJCAC.33956314:1(1-19)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/IJCAC.339563
C P(2024)Requirements Copilot: Ambiguity Management in Feature Requests2024 IEEE 32nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)10.1109/RE59067.2024.00069(517-519)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/RE59067.2024.00069
Kato TMasuda STsuda K(2024)Design and construction of requirement specifications ambiguity detection support method2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)10.1109/ICSTW60967.2024.00033(109-115)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTW60967.2024.00033
Yang XLiu JZhang D(2023)A Comprehensive Taxonomy for Prediction Models in Software EngineeringInformation10.3390/info1402011114:2(111)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/info14020111
SEKI YHAYASHI SSAEKI M(2022)Cataloging Bad Smells in Use Case Descriptions and Automating Their DetectionIEICE Transactions on Information and Systems10.1587/transinf.2021KBP0008E105.D:5(849-863)Online publication date: 1-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1587/transinf.2021KBP0008
HAYASHI SASANO KSAEKI M(2022)Automating Bad Smell Detection in Goal Refinement of Goal ModelsIEICE Transactions on Information and Systems10.1587/transinf.2021KBP0006E105.D:5(837-848)Online publication date: 1-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1587/transinf.2021KBP0006
Dar HImtiaz SLali M(2022)Reducing Requirements Ambiguity via GamificationComputational Intelligence and Neuroscience10.1155/2022/31834112022Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1155/2022/3183411
Yang YXia XLo DBi TGrundy JYang X(2022)Predictive Models in Software Engineering: Challenges and OpportunitiesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/350350931:3(1-72)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3503509
Amna APoels G(2022)Ambiguity in user storiesInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106824145:COnline publication date: 1-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106824
Ezzini SAbualhaija SArora CSabetzadeh MBriand L(2021)Using Domain-specific Corpora for Improved Handling of Ambiguity in RequirementsProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00133(1485-1497)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00133
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