On- and Off-Topic Classification and Semantic Annotation of User-Generated Software Requirements
Markus Dollmann, Michaela Geierhos · 2016
Users prefer natural language software requirements because of their usability and accessibility.When they describe their wishes for software development, they often provide off-topic information.We therefore present REaCT 1 , an automated approach for identifying and semantically annotating the on-topic parts of requirement descriptions.It is designed to support requirement engineers in the elicitation process on detecting and analyzing requirements in user-generated content.Since no lexical resources with domain-specific information about requirements are available, we created a corpus of requirements written in controlled language by instructed users and uncontrolled language by uninstructed users.We annotated these requirements regarding predicate-argument structures, conditions, priorities, motivations and semantic roles and used this information to train classifiers for information extraction purposes.REaCT achieves an accuracy of 92% for the on-and off-topic classification task and an F 1measure of 72% for the semantic annotation.