A prototype control document analyst for the Space Station program

Using techniques for natural-language understanding, a prototype called the Control Document Analyst (CDA) was developed to assist engineers checking interface descriptions and functional requirements in Space Station architectural control documents. The authors describes the background, objectives, approach, and implementation of the CDA. Finally, conclusions are drawn from its development and possible future work is described. It is concluded that the implementation of the CDA has shown that it is possible to textually analyze natural-language interface descriptions from technical documents and extract important information which can be used to fill slots within a frame-based representation of the documents. It is then relatively simple to highlight potential inconsistencies, thus saving a skilled systems engineer from a necessary but tedious task