Semantic parameterization is a conceptual modeling process for expressing natural language descriptions of a domain in first-order predicate logic.Travis D. Breaux and Annie I. Antón (2004). Deriving Semantic Models from Privacy Policies . North Carolina State University Computer Science Technical Report TR-2004-36.Travis D. Breaux and Annie I. Antón (2008). "Mining Rule Semantics to Understand Legislative Compliance" . North Carolina State University Computer Science Technical Report TR-2005-31.T.D. Breaux, A.I. Anton, J. Doyle, "Semantic parameterization: a process for modeling domain descriptions" , ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology, vol. 18, no. 2, Article 5, 2008. The process yields a formalization of natural language sentences in Description Logic to answer the who, what and where questions in the Inquiry-Cycle Model (ICM) developed by Colin Potts and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology.C. Potts, K. Takahashi, and A.I. Anton, "Inquiry-based requirements analysis", IEEE Software 11(2): 21–32, 1994. The parameterization process complements the Knowledge Acquisition and autOmated Specification (KAOS) method,A. Dardenne, A. van Lamsweerde and S. Fickas, "Goal-Directed Requirements Acquisition", Science of Computer Programming v. 20, North Holland, 1993, pp. 3-50. which formalizes answers to the when, why and how ICM questions in Temporal Logic, to complete the ICM formalization. The artifacts used in the parameterization process include a dictionary that aligns the domain lexicon with unique concepts, distinguishing between synonyms and polysemes, and several natural language patterns that aid in mapping common domain descriptions to formal specifications.
