Assisting requirements engineering with semantic document analysis

Requirements engineering is the first stage in the software life-cycle and is concerned with discovering and managing a software system's services, constraints and goals. Requirements engineers frequently face the task of extracting domain knowledge and recovering requirements from large documents. This is needed to complement the often incomplete information elicited from the people who will use or otherwise have a stake in the system to be developed. The documents that have to be analysed may vary from structured documents, such as specifications of work processes, to unstructured, verbatim reports of interviews or workplace observations. This paper shows that tools exploiting natural language processing techniques, in particular semantic analysis, are able to assist in retrieval from these documents.