Semantic Approaches to Microservice Identification: A Systematic Literature Review
Ait Manssour Nassima, Sbai Hanae, Karim Bäına, El Kodssi Iman · IEEE Access · 2025
The decomposition of monolithic systems into microservices architectures has become a critical challenge in modern software engineering. Whereas traditional approaches rely primarily on structural analysis, emerging semantic approaches promise more accurate decomposition by incorporating the meaning-aware analysis of software artifacts. This systematic literature review presents the first comprehensive analysis of semantic approaches to microservice identification, examination techniques, evaluation methodologies, and practical adoption challenges. We systematically searched the Scopus database for semantic-specific terms. After applying strict inclusion criteria, from an initial corpus of 40 publications, 17 high-quality papers were selected, representing a 48.6% selection rate. Each study was analyzed for its technical approach, evaluation methodology, and practical applicability. Four distinct categories were identified: NLP-based (41%), hybrid (35%), ontology-based (18%), and AI-enhanced (6%). Hybrid approaches demonstrated superior performance (F1-score: 0.81), whereas domain specific models show 15-20% accuracy improvements. The selected studies were published between 2020-2025, with the majority concentrated in 2025. This temporal concentration reflects the emergence of semantic approaches as distinct research areas. Our search covered 2010-2025 but found limited genuine semantic work in earlier years, indicating that semantic microservice identification is a recent phenomenon as evidenced by the current research surge [1], [2]. Semantic approaches consistently outperform traditional methods, achieving 23-45% improvements in coupling reduction and 15-38% enhancements in cohesion. However, challenges remain, including the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks, limited tool maturity, and insufficient industrial validation. The field must focus on benchmark development, production-ready tools, and industrial case studies.