A survey on approaches for writing precise natural language requirements

Natural language is widely used in industry to state requirements for all types of systems, because it is flexible and universal. Even if a modeling technique such as the UML is used, the requirements are usually stated in natural lan-guage first. However, natural language has one major drawback, which is its inherent ambiguity. This report surveys the state of the practice and the state of the art in techniques that aim at making natural language more precise. Ten contributions to this problem are summarized in this report. The report provides the basis for future work in the QUASAR project on guide-lines for creating informal requirements documents.