Int. J. Product Development, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2014 173 Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. A methodology supporting syntactic, lexical and semantic clarification of requirements in systems engineering François Christophe, Faisal Mokammel and Eric Coatanéa* Department of Engineering Design and Production, Aalto University School of Engineering, P.O. Box 14100, 00076 Aalto, Finland Email: frangois.christophe@aalto.fi Email: faisal.mokammel@aalto.fi Email: eric.coatanea@aalto.fi *Corresponding author An Nguyen Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University - Engineering & Computer Science, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8, Canada Email: ngu_th@cse.concordia.ca Mohamed Bakhouya Department of Engineering Design and Production, Aalto University School of Engineering, P.O. Box 14100, 00076 Aalto, Finland Email: Mohamed.Bakhouya @aalto.fi Alain Bernard Ecole Centrale de Nantes, IRCCyN UMR CNRS 6597 1, rue de la Noe, BP 92101, 44321 Nantes Cedex 3, France Email: Alain.Bernard@irccyn.ec-nantes.fr Abstract: Product development is a challenging activity. The process begins with a description and representation of a design problem in form of a requirements document. It involves two phases: elicitation by description in Natural Language (NL) and clarification of the description. NL implies interpretation of terms within a context to avoid later misunderstanding. The paper proposes a methodology to elicit and refine the initial needs. The elicitation is done by finding support information from several sources such as patent databases, encyclopaedias and commercial websites. The refinement