LLM-Driven Active Learning for Dependency Analysis of Mobile App Requirements Through Contextual Reasoning and Structural Relationships
Nuha Almoqren, Mubarak Rashed Alrashoud · Applied Sciences · 2025
In today’s fast-paced release cycles, mobile app user reviews offer a valuable source for tracking the evolution of user needs. At the core of these needs lies a structure of interdependencies—some enhancements are only relevant in specific usage contexts, while others may conflict when implemented together. Identifying these relationships is essential for anticipating feature interactions, resolving contradictions, and enabling context-aware, user-driven planning. The present work introduces an ontology-enhanced AI framework for predicting whether the requirements mentioned in reviews are interdependent. The core component is a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) classifier retrained within a large-language-model-driven active learning loop that focuses on instances with uncertainty. The framework integrates contextual and structural reasoning; contextual analysis captures the semantic intent and functional role of each requirement, enriching the understanding of user expectations. Structural reasoning relies on a domain-specific ontology that serves as both a knowledge base and an inference layer, guiding the grouping of requirements. The model achieved strong performance on annotated banking app reviews, with a validation F1-score of 0.9565 and an area under the ROC curve (AUC) exceeding 0.97. The study results contribute to supporting developers in prioritizing features based on dependencies and delivering more coherent, conflict-free releases.