Analysing anaphoric ambiguity in natural language requirements

Analysing anaphoric ambiguity in natural language requirements
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分析自然语言要求中的照应歧义

DOI:
10.1007/s00766-011-0119-y
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发表时间:
2011
影响因子:
2.8
通讯作者:
Yang H
Yang H
中科院分区:
计算机科学2区
文献类型:
--
作者:
Yang H

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许多需求文档都是用自然语言(NL)编写的。然而,NL的灵活性带来了在需求中引入不必要的模糊性和利益相关者之间误解的风险。在本文中,我们描述了一种自动化的方法来识别潜在的有害歧义,这发生在文本被不同的读者不同的解释。我们专注于回指歧义,当读者可能不同意代词应如何解释时发生。我们描述了一些解释学,每一个都捕捉到了可能导致读者倾向于对文本进行特定解释的信息。我们使用这些解释学来构建一个分类器,进而预测特定解释的偏好程度。我们收集了多个人的判断的解释,表现出照应歧义的要求,并展示了如何分布这些判断可以用来评估是否一个特定的歧义是有害的。给定一个用自然语言编写的需求文档,我们的方法可以识别包含照应歧义的句子,并使用分类器来提醒需求编写者存在误解风险的文本。我们报告了一系列的实验,我们进行了评估我们开发的自动化系统,以支持我们的方法的性能。结果表明,该系统实现了较高的召回率与一致的改善基线精度受到一定的歧义容忍度水平,使我们能够探索和突出现实的和潜在的问题的歧义在实际的需求文件。
Many requirements documents are written in natural language (NL). However, with the flexibility of NL comes the risk of introducing unwanted ambiguities in the requirements and misunderstandings between stakeholders. In this paper, we describe an automated approach to identify potentially nocuous ambiguity, which occurs when text is interpreted differently by different readers. We concentrate on anaphoric ambiguity, which occurs when readers may disagree on how pronouns should be interpreted. We describe a number of heuristics, each of which captures information that may lead a reader to favor a particular interpretation of the text. We use these heuristics to build a classifier, which in turn predicts the degree to which particular interpretations are preferred. We collected multiple human judgements on the interpretation of requirements exhibiting anaphoric ambiguity and showed how the distribution of these judgements can be used to assess whether a particular instance of ambiguity is nocuous. Given a requirements document written in natural language, our approach can identify sentences that contain anaphoric ambiguity, and use the classifier to alert the requirements writer of text that runs the risk of misinterpretation. We report on a series of experiments that we conducted to evaluate the performance of the automated system we developed to support our approach. The results show that the system achieves high recall with a consistent improvement on baseline precision subject to some ambiguity tolerance levels, allowing us to explore and highlight realistic and potentially problematic ambiguities in actual requirements documents.
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