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Towards the creation of a CNL adapted to requirements writing by combining writing recommendations and spontaneous regularities: example in a space project

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Abstract

The Quality Department of the French National Space Agency (CNES, Centre National d’Études Spatiales) wishes to design a writing guide based on the real and regular writing of requirements. As a first step in this project, the present article proposes a linguistic analysis of requirements written in French by CNES engineers. One of our goals is to determine to what extent they conform to several rules laid down in two existing Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs), namely the Simplified Technical English developed by the AeroSpace and Defense Industries Association of Europe and the Guide for Writing Requirements proposed by the International Council on Systems Engineering. Indeed, although CNES engineers are not obliged to follow any controlled language in their writing of requirements, we believe that language regularities are likely to emerge from this task, mainly due to the writers’ experience. We are seeking to identify these regularities in order to use them as a basis for a new CNL for the writing of requirements. The issue is approached using natural language processing tools to identify sentences that do not comply with the rules or contain specific linguistic phenomena. We further review these sentences to understand why the recommendations cannot (or should not) always be applied when specifying large-scale projects.

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Notes

  1. “Analysis would gain by contrasting two normative processes: norming, which is an intrinsic feature of spontaneous language activity, and normalization, which is a conscious and planned activity.”

  2. “Any body of language that enables mutual understanding possesses its own systemic norms: it is this logic that we will call `norming'.”

  3. According to Jakobson (1960), for example, the referential function, which is the closest to the one consisting in transmitting information, is only one among the six functions of language.

  4. “The controller shall send the driver's itinary (sic) for the day to the driver” must be preferred to “The controller shall send the driver his itinary (sic) for the day”.

  5. But, once again, these rules can be difficult to understand or apply; one of them, for instance, states that “when you count words for sentence length, each word in a hyphenated group counts as a separate word unless it is a prefix”, which implies a morphological analysis of the words to be properly applied.

  6. Compare: “The agent does the operation” (active voice) vs. “The operation is done [by the agent]” (passive voice). In the first case, the sentence would not be grammatical without its subject; in the second case, the agent is optional.

  7. “Si la différence (en valeur absolue) entre les dates de fin de lecture de deux fichiers, lus sur tranche de COME M—canal TMI i et sur tranche de COME N—canal TMI j, est inférieure à OPS_DELAI_INTER_FIN_LEC secondes, alors il est interdit d'enchaîner (lecture enchaînée) par la lecture de la tranche de COME N sur le canal i et de la tranche de COME M sur le canal j.” [“If the difference (in absolute terms) between the reading end-dates of the two files (read on COME M—canal TMI i and on COME N—canal TMI j) is lower than OPS_DELAI_INTER_FIN_LEC seconds, then it is forbidden to continue (continuous reading) with the reading of COME N on canal i and of COME M on canal j”].

  8. In French, the complementizer “que” is mandatory.

  9. Or, if we really want to use the active voice: “Le nom de cette durée sera DPDV_COEFF” [“The name of this duration will be DPDV_COEFF”].

  10. In the sentences using a present verb, however, it is not always clear. In the following example: “L’opérateur […] peut, à tout moment, se connecter/déconnecter du système d’exploitation” [“The operator can, at any time, connect to or disconnect from the operating system”], is this already the case, or is it a condition to be met by the system – and therefore an instruction?.

  11. Example: “Le CCC met à disposition du COO:” [“The CCC provides the COO with:”].

  12. For instance, the sentence “The system will provide black and white pictures” is not equivalent to “The system will provide black pictures” + “The system will provide white pictures”.

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Acknowledgments

This study is carried out as part of a PhD thesis granted by the CNES and the Regional Council Midi-Pyrénées. We would like to thank the CNES for their active cooperation as well as for providing us with the requirements corpus. We are also very grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this special issue and to those of the Fourth Workshop on Controlled Natural Language (CNL 2014), for all their relevant comments, suggestions and references.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CLLE-ERSS, CNRS and Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France

    Anne Condamines & Maxime Warnier

  2. CNES, Toulouse, France

    Maxime Warnier

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  1. Anne Condamines
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  2. Maxime Warnier
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Correspondence to Maxime Warnier.

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Condamines, A., Warnier, M. Towards the creation of a CNL adapted to requirements writing by combining writing recommendations and spontaneous regularities: example in a space project. Lang Resources & Evaluation 51, 221–247 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-016-9368-1

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