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.

As part of a research project that aims at proposing a new methodology for defining a series of rules for writing good requirementsoften referred to as a Controlled Natural Language (CNL)-for the French Space Agency (CNES, Centre National d'Études Spatiales), we asked both experienced engineers and non-experts to fill in an online questionnaire in order to gather their perception about requirements written according to recommendations commonly found in CNLs, and to compare them with seemingly more natural and less restrictive formulations. The examples we used for this case study were adapted from genuine requirements in French, extracted from several specifications of a recent space project. Our main goal is to evaluate whether (and to what extent) the writing rules we considered may be relevant for the engineers at CNES. In particular, we try to identify cases where the experts' opinions differ from the recommended use and where these rules could thus probably be adapted.

This article shows the variability of the various international classifications and nomenclatures, the need for structured guidelines with more attention to precise wording and the need for classification expertise embedded in sophisticated terminological resources. End users need support to perform their clinical work in their own language, while still assuring standardised and semantic interoperable medical registration. Collaboration between computational linguists, knowledge engineers, health informaticians and domain experts is needed.

Abstract. In the field of requirements engineering, the use of the so-called boilerplates (i.e. standard phrases and sentences containing gaps to be filled in) is a popular solution to reduce variation among requirements and writers, and thus to improve the clarity of technical specifications. However, the examples of boilerplates found in the literature are often very general, as they need to be applicable to projects as varied as computer software and aircraft or industrial machines. As a result, they only partially fulfill their role, leaving a lot of freedom to the writers in charge of filling in the gaps. Instead, we would like to propose a bottom-up approach for discovering more specific sequences that could constitute either boilerplates or elements to instantiate these boilerplates. To this end, we investigate whether sequential data mining techniques can be used on a small corpus of genuine requirements written in French at CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales), the French Space Agency.