Parsing Software Requirements with an Ontology-based Semantic Role Labeler
Michael Roth, Ewan Klein · 2015
Software requirements describe functional and non-functional aspects of a software system and form the basis for the development process. Accordingly, requirements of existing systems can pro-vide insights regarding the re-usability of already implemented software artifacts. To facilitate direct comparison between requirements of existing and to be developed systems, we propose to automati-cally map requirements in natural language text to structured semantic representations. For this task, we adapt techniques from semantic role labeling to a high-level ontology that defines concepts and relations for describing static software functionalities. The proposed method achieves a precision and recall of 77.9 % and 74.5%, respectively, on an annotated software requirements dataset and significantly outperforms two baselines that are based on lexical and syntactic patterns. 1