The REVIEW system: from formal specifications to natural language

Formal descriptions, while difficult for most human readers to understand, are convenient for specifying large software systems, where completeness and consistency are important issues. Informal specifications can offer advantages in conciseness and readability, but ambiguities and contradictions are an unavoidable side-effect. Since a specification often acts as a formal contract between the software developer and the customer, it is essential that both sides be able to fully understand the specification document. Systems have been proposed which help the software client better understand the specification by automatically paraphrasing it in natural language. The authors describe the architecture of the REVIEW system, which forms a part of the Metaview metasystem for capturing requirements information. Some example natural language outputs are shown for a sample requirements database