Innovations in Natural Language Document Processing for Requirements Engineering

This paper evaluates the potential contributions of natural language processing to requirements engineering. We present a selective history of the relationship between requirements engineering (RE) and natural-language processing (NLP), and briefly summarize relevant recent trends in NLP. The paper outlines basic issues in RE and how they relate to interactions between a NLP front end and system-development processes. We suggest some improvements to NLP that may be possible in the context of RE and conclude with an assessment of what should be done to improve likelihood of practical impact in this direction.

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