Linguistic Analysis of Requirements of a Space Project and their Conformity with the Recommendations Proposed by a Controlled Natural Language

TL;DR

This study analyzes French space project requirements to assess their conformity with INCOSE's guidelines, aiming to inform the development of a controlled natural language-based writing guide for engineers.

Contribution

It provides a linguistic analysis of real requirements to evaluate adherence to INCOSE rules and explores reasons for non-compliance in large-scale project documentation.

Findings

Some requirements conform to INCOSE rules

Language regularities emerge from engineers' experience

Certain requirements cannot always follow INCOSE recommendations

Abstract

The long term aim of the project carried out by the French National Space Agency (CNES) is to design a writing guide based on the real and regular writing of requirements. As a first step in the project, this paper proposes a lin-guistic analysis of requirements written in French by CNES engineers. The aim is to determine to what extent they conform to two rules laid down in INCOSE, a recent guide for writing requirements. Although CNES engineers are not obliged to follow any Controlled Natural Language in their writing of requirements, we believe that language regularities are likely to emerge from this task, mainly due to the writers' experience. The issue is approached using natural language processing tools to identify sentences that do not comply with INCOSE rules. We further review these sentences to understand why the recommendations cannot (or should not) always be applied when specifying large-scale projects.