The Circe approach to the systematic analysis of NL requirements

This paper presents Circe, an environment for the analysis of natural language requirements. Circe is presented in terms of its architecture, based on a transformational paradigm. Details are given for the various transformation steps, including (i) a novel technique for parsing natural language requirements, and (ii) an expert system based on modular agents, embodying intensional knowledge about software systems in general. Some of the features of the environment are shown by means of an example. Various stages of requirements analysis are covered, from initial sketches to pseudo-code and UML models.