Semantic Frame Embeddings for Detecting Relations between Software Requirements

Waad Alhoshan, Riza Batista-Navarro, Liping Zhao


Abstract
The early phases of requirements engineering (RE) deal with a vast amount of software requirements (i.e., requirements that define characteristics of software systems), which are typically expressed in natural language. Analysing such unstructured requirements, usually obtained from users’ inputs, is considered a challenging task due to the inherent ambiguity and inconsistency of natural language. To support such a task, methods based on natural language processing (NLP) can be employed. One of the more recent advances in NLP is the use of word embeddings for capturing contextual information, which can then be applied in word analogy tasks. In this paper, we describe a new resource, i.e., embedding-based representations of semantic frames in FrameNet, which was developed to support the detection of relations between software requirements. Our embeddings, which encapsulate contextual information at the semantic frame level, were trained on a large corpus of requirements (i.e., a collection of more than three million mobile application reviews). The similarity between these frame embeddings is then used as a basis for detecting semantic relatedness between software requirements. Compared with existing resources underpinned by word-level embeddings alone, and frame embeddings built upon pre-trained vectors, our proposed frame embeddings obtained better performance against judgements of an RE expert. These encouraging results demonstrate the strong potential of the resource in supporting RE analysis tasks (e.g., traceability), which we plan to investigate as part of our future work.
Anthology ID:
W19-0606
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Student Papers
Month:
May
Year:
2019
Address:
Gothenburg, Sweden
Editors:
Simon Dobnik, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Vera Demberg, Kathrein Abu Kwaik, Vladislav Maraev
Venue:
IWCS
SIG:
SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
44–51
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-0606
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-0606
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Waad Alhoshan, Riza Batista-Navarro, and Liping Zhao. 2019. Semantic Frame Embeddings for Detecting Relations between Software Requirements. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Student Papers, pages 44–51, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic Frame Embeddings for Detecting Relations between Software Requirements (Alhoshan et al., IWCS 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-0606.pdf