VITAL TEXT ANALYTICS SYSTEM FOR THE ENHANCEMENT OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING DOCUMENTS AND OTHER DOCUMENTS

• US 20140172417A1
• Filed: 12/13/2013
• Published: 06/19/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 12/16/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Cloud 9 LLC
• Original Assignee: Cloud 9 LLC
• Inventors: Monk, Gordon H. II, Miller, James, Gooding, Donald A., Cowart, Wayne, Kosner, Anthony Wing
• Granted Patent: US 9,678,949 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/9
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/30 Semantic analysis

Abstract

A Vital Text Analytics System (VTAS), incorporating a repository of enterprise terms or concepts, is one that improves the readability and fidelity of technical specifications, instructions, training manuals requirements engineering documents and other related engineering documents, typically from a single organization or workgroup. The system stresses ontological analysis of a corpus of related documents, and applies a suite of computational tools that supports the identification and assessment of risk in evaluating the content of the documents, as well as providing statistical measures reflecting the frequency and severity of document features that threaten comprehension.

Claims

1. A risk assessment software analysis system, comprising:

application software installed on a computer system;

the application software comprising;

a repository storing requirements documents;

a sentence model processing tool annotating within a computational object module parts of speech from the text of at least one requirements document as one of at least a pointer, a linker, and a situator;

a risk detector applying risk patterns based on a relationship between all or a part of any text annotated as a pointer, linker, and situator and other annotated text to identify risk elements as any text from the document matching at least one of the risk patterns;

a risk assessor applying a severity of risk value to at least one identified risk element; and

wherein the risk patterns represent text capable of ambiguity and misinterpretation as applied to the text.

2. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 1 wherein the at least one of the pointer, the linker, and the situator comprise terms based on a framework of structural classes that are developed from the cognitive functions that are invoked in a reader in reading the text of the requirements document.

3. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 1 further comprising a document model processing tool that identifies the text of the risk element within the text of the entire document;

and

wherein the text is used to develop a document ontology.

4. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 3 further comprising a corpus model processing tool that identifies the text of the risk element within the text of an entire corpus of documents;

and

wherein the text is used to develop a corporate ontology.

5. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 4 wherein the severity of risk value is determined by the risk assessor from the usage of the text of the risk element in one of at least the entire document and entire corpus of documents.

6. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 5 further comprising a quality index determined using the risk assessor from the value of the severity of risk of all risk elements within one of at least the entire document and entire corpus of documents.

7. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 1 further comprising:

a concept library; and

wherein using the application software, data is collected from a series of linguistic analyses of terms from one or more requirements documents;

the data is aggregated to identify salient terms that are stored as an ontological list in the concept library;

wherein the salient terms are used to develop explications and alternative representations through one of at least group sourcing, crowd sourcing, and external resources.

8. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 7 further comprising the development of at least one explication template that includes attributes of the salient terms and wherein the attributes are comprehensively identified based on a topology of the salient terms within a domain or category of relevant terms or concepts and wherein the topology is used to contribute to the corporate ontology.

9. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 8 further comprising an interface for the display of training materials within a curriculum including the explications and alternate representations within the one or more requirements documents to offer alternative text to replace the text of one or more risk elements identified within the one or more requirements documents.

10. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 7 wherein the collected data from the series of linguistic analyses includes one of at least frequency of occurrence, location, concordance values, collocation, depth of occurrence, breadth of occurrence data.

11. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 7 further comprising:

a concept map; and

wherein relationships of the salient terms are mapped within the concept map.

12. The risk assessment software analysis system of claim 11, wherein collected data in the concept map is shaped and color coded based on threshold settings.

13. A method of identifying and assessing risks within a requirements document using a software analysis system, comprising the steps of:

parsing text from one or more requirements documents using a software application system installed on a computer platform;

converting the text to a machine readable format;

performing a plurality of linguistics analyses on the formatted text including the identification of parts of speech;

annotating the parts of speech identified within the text from at least one requirements document with one of at least a pointer, a linker, and a situator;

integrating the results of a plurality of linguistics analyses performed and the annotations of the text from at least one sentence into a computational object module;

applying risk patterns based on the relationships between all or a part of the text annotated as one of at least a pointer, a linker, and a situator and other annotated text, the risk patterns capable of representing ambiguities and misinterpretations;

identifying risk elements as annotated text matching an applied risk pattern.

14. The method of identifying and assessing risks within a requirements document using a software analysis system of claim 13, further comprising the steps of:

highlighting the one or more identified risk elements in the one or more requirements documents; and

assessing the one or more risk elements for severity of risk based on the quality of the matching of the risk element to the risk pattern.

15. The method of identifying and assessing risks within a requirements document using a software analysis system of claim 13, further comprising the steps of:

compiling at least one ontological list of salient terms from the one or more requirements documents and

developing a explication template that includes attributes of the salient terms and wherein the attributes are comprehensively identified based on the topology of the salient terms within a domain or category of relevant terms or concepts.

16. The method of identifying and assessing risks within a requirements document using a software analysis system of claim 15 further comprising the step of constructing explications for the salient terms from the explication templates completed by one or more experts.

17. The method of identifying and assessing risks within a requirements document using a software analysis system of claim 16 further comprising the step of storing the one or more of the explications within a concept library.

18. The method of identifying and assessing risks within a requirements document using a software analysis system of claim 17 further comprising the step of developing a topology from the one or more identified risk elements and explications to construct an ontology and one or more alternate ontologies.

19. The method of identifying and assessing risks within a requirements document using a software analysis system of claim 18 further comprising the step of ranking the requirements document based on the one or more identified risk elements and explications;

and

displaying the ranking within the one or more requirements documents.

20. The method of identifying and assessing risks within a requirements document using a software analysis system of claim 18 further comprising the step of displaying the explications as text to replace a risk element in the one or more requirements documents.