AN APPROACH FOR DETECTING SYNTAX AND SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY IN SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT SPECIFICATION

Software requirements are considered to be ambiguous if the requirements statement could have more than
one interpretation. The ambiguous requirements could cause the software developers to develop software
which is different from what the customer needs. The focus of this paper is to propose an approach to detect
syntax and syntactic ambiguity in software requirements specification. In this paper, Parts of speech (POS)
tagging technique has been used to detect these ambiguities. A prototype tool has been developed in order to
evaluate the proposed approach. The evaluation is done by comparing the detection capabilities of the
proposed tool against human capabilities. The overall results show that the humans do have some difficulties
in detecting ambiguity in software requirements, especially the syntactic ambiguity and software
requirements that contains both syntax and syntactic ambiguity in one sentence. The proposed tool can
definitely help the analyst in detecting ambiguity in Software requirements.