Discovering Speech Acts in Online Discussions: A Tool-supported method.
Itzel Morales-Ramirez, Anna Perini · 2014
Abstract. The increasing participation of users of software applications in on-line discussions is attracting the attention of researchers in requirements elicita-tion to look at this channel of communication as potential source of requirements knowledge. Taking the perspective of software engineers who analyse online dis-cussions, the task of identifying bugs and new features by reading huge threads of e-mails can become effort demanding and error prone. Recognising discussants’ speech acts in an automated manner is important to reveal intentions, such as suggesting, complaining, which can provide indicators for bug isolation and re-quirements. This paper presents a tool-supported method for identifying speech acts, which may provide hints to software engineers to speed up the analysis of online discussions. It builds on speech act theory and on an adaptation of the GATE framework, which implements computational linguistic techniques.