A formal approach for measuring the lexical ambiguity degree in natural language requirement specification: Polysemes and Homonyms focused

In natural language regardless the presentation, being spoken or written we can distinguish different types of ambiguity. In this paper we will focus on written lexical ambiguity, which is caused when a word or set of words has more than one meaning. This inherent problem of natural language is generated by two types of words: Polysemes and Homonyms. Commonly requirement specifications are expressed in natural language even with the knowledge of inherent problems this have. Measuring ambiguity typically only includes the language itself as the universe; in this paper we include the transport channel and communication model to give a formal approach to find ambiguity degree based on stakeholder knowledge and how reader's brain resolves ambiguity for a given text.

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