Understanding natural language requirement descriptions for telecommunication services

Demands on telecommunication services will increase as today´s society evolves. A quick response to these demands will require clarifying what is truly needed for services at an early stage of system development. It is therefore important to allow users to define these demands. Natural language is suitable for describing requirements. However, diverse expressions are allowed in natural language, and users have many description viewpoints. The main issue is discerning the meanings behind the various expressions, and the paper aims to resolve that point. The paper creates a model for telecommunication services from the viewpoint of their functions and terminal operations and prescribes a requirement description method. The paper also reveals that the diversity in expressions is caused by a set of three orthogonal viewpoints: an interface viewpoint from among three entities, i.e., the terminal, network and user; a viewpoint from both sides of each interface; and a logical and physical viewpoint. It then systematizes the telecommunication service concepts based on the model. Finally, it proposes a method for understanding expression meanings by managing the correspondence between concepts and expressions