A NATURAL LANGUAGE APPROACH FOR REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING C. ROLLANDl C. PROIX2 ABSTRACT : The term Requirements Engineering refers to this part of a database development cycle that involves investigating the problems and requirements of the users community and developing a conceptual specification of the future system. Natural language plays an important role during this stage that has proved to be crucial in the development of computerized systems. The required acquisition of application domain knowledge is achieved either through documents and texts analysis or by means of interviews i.e through language manipulation. Similarly validation of the specification is made via oral discussions with users. The paper proposes that Requirements Engineering (R.E) should be supported by a CASE tool based on a linguistic approach. It presents a R.E support environment that generates the conceptual specification from a description of the problem space provided through natural language statements. Complementary, validation is based on texts generation from the conceptual specification to natural language. The paper focuses on the linguistic approach, demonstrates its generality and overviews its implementation in a CASE tool. KEY WORDS : Requirements engineering, Natural language analysis, conceptual schema, information system design, text generation 1. Introduction The need for modelling techniques by which systems may be described in high level conceptual terms has been recognized in the earlier phases of Databases and Information Systems (DB/IS) development in industry, business and administration. 1 Universite de Paris 1, 17 rue de Ia Sorbonne, 75231 Paris cedex 05, France 2 Societe CRIL, 146 Boulevard de Valmy 92707 Colombes cedex, France From: CAiSE 1992, LNCS 593 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1992 35