Linguistic Analysis of Requirements of a Space Project and Their Conformity with the Recommendations Proposed by a Controlled Natural Language

International audienceWe propose a linguistic analysis of requirements written in French for a project carried out by the French National Space Agency (CNES). The aim is to determine to what extent they conform to some of the rules laid down in INCOSE, a recent guide for writing requirements, with a focus on the notion of sentence " comprehensibility ". Although CNES engineers are not obliged to follow any Controlled Natural Language, we believe that language regularities are likely to emerge from this task, mainly due to the writers' experience. As a first step, we use natural language processing tools to identify sentences that do not comply with INCOSE rules. We further review these sentences to understand why the recommendations cannot (or should not) always be applied when specifying large-scale projects, and how they could be improved. This paper presents a corpus linguistics approach applied to the melioration of requirements writing. We propose a linguistic diagnosis of the way requirements are written in a space project by comparing these requirements with a guide for writing specifications (a controlled natural language). Initial results obtained from this analysis suggest that guides for writing specifications are not fully adapted to the real writing process: they are sometimes too constraining, and sometimes insufficiently so. In the medium term, the aim is to propose another guide based on the spontaneous regularities observed in requirements. The paper comprises two parts. In the first one (see section 2), we present the context of our study and the tool-assisted method used for making the diagnosis. In the second one (see section 3), we describe and discuss our preliminary results

Parental smoking and post-infancy wheezing in children: a prospective cohort study.

The contribution of parental smoking to wheezing in children was studied in a subset of all British births between April 5 and 11, 1970 (N = 9,670). Children of smoking mothers had an 18.0 per cent cumulative incidence of post-infancy wheezing through 10 years of age, compared with 16.2 per cent among children of nonsmoking mothers (risk ratio 1.11, 95% CI: 1.02, 1.21). This difference was confined to wheezing attributed to wheezy bronchitis, of which children of smokers had 7.4 per cent, and those of nonsmokers had 5.2 per cent (risk ratio 1.44, 95% CI: 1.24, 1.68). The incidence of wheezy bronchitis increased as mothers smoked more cigarettes. After multiple logistic regression analysis was used to control for paternal smoking, social status, sex, family allergy, crowding, breast-feeding, gas cooking and heating, and bedroom dampness, the association of maternal smoking with childhood wheezy bronchitis persisted. Some of this effect was explained by maternal respiratory symptoms and maternal depression, but not by neonatal problems, the child's allergic symptoms, or paternal respiratory symptoms. There was a 14 per cent increase in childhood wheezy bronchitis when mothers smoked over four cigarettes per day, and a 49 per cent increase when mothers smoked over 14 cigarettes daily