Requirements for tools for ambiguity identification and measurement in natural language requirements specifications

This paper proposes a two-step approach to identifying ambiguities in natural language (NL) requirements specifications (RSs). In the first step, a tool would apply a set of ambiguity measures to a RS in order to identify potentially ambiguous sentences in the RS. In the second step, another tool would show what specifically is potentially ambiguous about each potentially ambiguous sentence. The final decision of ambiguity remains with the human users of the tools. The paper describes several requirements-identification experiments with several small NL RSs using four prototypes of the first tool based on linguistic instruments and resources of different complexity and a manual mock-up of the second tool.