An expert system designed to automatically generate requirements receives a set of natural-language statements. The system extracts from each statement keywords, rules, conditions, and semantic meanings of the statement's verbs. Verbs are organized into groups of synonyms and each statement's verb groups are each associated with one or more of that statement's keywords. Each statement is categorized as having simple, complex, or compound atomicity, as a function of the numbers of that statement's keywords, rules and verbs, and is assigned a degree of orthogonality as a function of the numbers of that statement's keywords that are associated with each of that statement's groups. Each statement is divided into segments and the procedure is repeated upon each segment until all resulting segments have simple atomicity. The segments are forwarded to downstream computerized modules that use the segments as requirements for a planned project.