From Natural Language Requirements to Formal Specification Using an Ontology

摘要

In order to check requirement specifications written in natural language, we have chosen to model domain knowledge through an ontology and to formally represent user requirements by its population. Our approach of ontology population focuses on instance property identification from texts. We do so using extraction rules automatically acquired from a training corpus and a bootstrapping terminology. These rules aim at identifying instance property mentions represented by triples of terms, using lexical, syntactic and semantic levels of analysis. They are generated from recurrent syntactic paths between terms denoting instances of concepts and properties. We show how focusing on instance property identification allows us to precisely identify concept instances explicitly or implicitly mentioned in texts.