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Software requirements as an application domain for natural language processing

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Abstract

Map** functional requirements first to specifications and then to code is one of the most challenging tasks in software development. Since requirements are commonly written in natural language, they can be prone to ambiguity, incompleteness and inconsistency. Structured semantic representations allow requirements to be translated to formal models, which can be used to detect problems at an early stage of the development process through validation. Storing and querying such models can also facilitate software reuse. Several approaches constrain the input format of requirements to produce specifications, however they usually require considerable human effort in order to adopt domain-specific heuristics and/or controlled languages. We propose a mechanism that automates the map** of requirements to formal representations using semantic role labeling. We describe the first publicly available dataset for this task, employ a hierarchical framework that allows requirements concepts to be annotated, and discuss how semantic role labeling can be adapted for parsing software requirements.

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Notes

  1. A system also involves non-functional requirements that describe quality criteria. However, this paper focuses on functional requirements, which specify what a system can do.

  2. http://www.scasefp7.eu.

  3. http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222.

  4. http://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/.

  5. http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/PR-rdf-schema-19990303/.

  6. http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-guide-20040210/.

  7. Although we don’t rely on OWL inference capabilities explicitly in this paper, they are useful for expressing integrity conditions over the ontology, such as ensuring that certain properties have inverse properties (e.g. owns/owned _ by).

  8. https://github.com/edumbill/doap/wiki.

  9. We first introduced this parser in (Roth and Klein 2015). This section provides additional details of the parsing architecture and underlying motivations.

  10. http://code.google.com/p/mate-tools/.

  11. http://github.com/turian/neural-language-model.

  12. http://protege.stanford.edu.

  13. The majority of requirements collected in this way were provided by a software development course organized jointly by several European universities, cf. http://www.fer.unizg.hr/rasip/dsd.

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Acknowledgements

Parts of this work have been supported by the FP7 Collaborative Project S-CASE (Grant Agreement No 610717), funded by the European Commission.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Themistoklis Diamantopoulos & Andreas Symeonidis

  2. Department of Language Science and Technology, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Michael Roth

  3. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Ewan Klein

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  1. Themistoklis Diamantopoulos
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  2. Michael Roth
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  4. Ewan Klein
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Correspondence to Michael Roth.

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Diamantopoulos, T., Roth, M., Symeonidis, A. et al. Software requirements as an application domain for natural language processing. Lang Resources & Evaluation 51, 495–524 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-017-9381-z

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