BEST PAPERS OF RE’10: REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING IN A MULTI-FACETED WORLD Relevance-based abstraction identification: technique and evaluation

When first approaching an unfamiliar domain or requirements document, it is often useful to get a quick grasp of what the essential concepts and entities in the domain are. This process is called abstraction identification, where the word abstraction refers to an entity or concept that has a particular significance in the domain. Abstraction identification has been proposed and evaluated as a useful technique in requirements engineering (RE). In this paper, we propose a new technique for automated abstraction identification called relevance-based abstraction identification (RAI), and evaluate its performance—in multiple configurations and through two refinements—compared to other tools and techniques proposed in the literature, where we find that RAI significantly outperforms previous techniques. We present an experiment measuring the effectiveness of RAI compared to human judgement, and discuss how RAI could be used to good effect in requirements engineering.

[1]  Peter Sawyer,et al.  Shallow knowledge as an aid to deep understanding in early phase requirements engineering , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[2]  Marie-Francine Moens,et al.  Automatic Indexing and Abstracting of Document Texts , 2000, Computational Linguistics.

[3]  Jane Huffman Hayes,et al.  Advancing candidate link generation for requirements tracing: the study of methods , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[4]  S. T. Dumais,et al.  Using latent semantic analysis to improve access to textual information , 1988, CHI '88.

[5]  Martin F. Porter,et al.  An algorithm for suffix stripping , 1997, Program.

[6]  Douglas B. Lenat,et al.  CYC: a large-scale investment in knowledge infrastructure , 1995, CACM.

[7]  Paul Rayson,et al.  Comparing Corpora using Frequency Profiling , 2000, Proceedings of the workshop on Comparing corpora -.

[8]  Paul S. Jacobs,et al.  Using statistical methods to improve knowledge-based news categorization , 1993, IEEE Expert.

[9]  Andrew M. Finch,et al.  Improving statistical machine translation using shallow linguistic knowledge , 2007, Comput. Speech Lang..

[10]  Daniel M. Berry,et al.  AbstFinder, A Prototype Natural Language Text Abstraction Finder for Use in Requirements Elicitation , 1997, Automated Software Engineering.

[11]  Kyo Kageura,et al.  METHODS OF AUTOMATIC TERM RECOGNITION : A REVIEW , 1996 .

[12]  M. E. Maron,et al.  Automatic Indexing: An Experimental Inquiry , 1961, JACM.

[13]  Björn Regnell,et al.  A linguistic-engineering approach to large-scale requirements management , 2005, IEEE Software.

[14]  G. Leech,et al.  Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus , 2001 .

[15]  George A. Miller,et al.  WordNet: A Lexical Database for English , 1995, HLT.

[16]  Stephen Clark,et al.  Best Practices for Automated Traceability , 2007, Computer.

[17]  Stephen Fickas,et al.  Goal-Directed Requirements Acquisition , 1993, Sci. Comput. Program..

[18]  Peter Sawyer,et al.  A Flexible Framework To Experiment With Ontology Learning Techniques , 2007, SGAI Conf..

[19]  W. Nelson Francis,et al.  FREQUENCY ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH USAGE: LEXICON AND GRAMMAR , 1983 .

[20]  Udo Hahn,et al.  You Can't Beat Frequency (Unless You Use Linguistic Knowledge) - A Qualitative Evaluation of Association Measures for Collocation and Term Extraction , 2006, ACL.

[21]  Peter Sawyer,et al.  On the Effectiveness of Abstraction Identification in Requirements Engineering , 2010, 2010 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference.

[22]  Udo Hahn,et al.  Finding new terminology in very large corpora , 2005, K-CAP '05.

[23]  H. P. Edmundson,et al.  Automatic abstracting and indexing—survey and recommendations , 1961, CACM.

[24]  Michael Oakes,et al.  Statistics for Corpus Linguistics , 1998 .

[25]  Marti A. Hearst.  Automatic Acquisition of Hyponyms from Large Text Corpora , 1992, COLING.

[26]  Leonid Kof.  Text analysis for requirements engineering , 2005 .

[27]  Peter Sawyer,et al.  Ensemble Methods for Ontology Learning - An Empirical Experiment to Evaluate Combinations of Concept Acquisition Techniques , 2008, Seventh IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Computer and Information Science (icis 2008).

[28]  Sophia Ananiadou,et al.  A Methodology for Automatic Term Recognition , 1994, COLING.

[29]  Anthony Finkelstein,et al.  Abstraction-based requirements management , 2006, ROA '06.

[30]  Renaud Lecoeuche.  Finding comparatively important concepts between texts , 2000, Proceedings ASE 2000. Fifteenth IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering.

[31]  Peter Sawyer,et al.  Identifying tacit knowledge-based requirements , 2006, IEE Proc. Softw..

[32]  Peter Sawyer,et al.  The REVERE Project: Experiments with the Application of Probabilistic NLP to Systems Engineering , 2000, NLDB.

[33]  Y. S. Maarek,et al.  The use of lexical affinities in requirements extraction , 1989, IWSSD '89.

[34]  Erick C. Jones,et al.  RFID in Logistics: A Practical Introduction , 2007 .

[35]  Jan Snajder,et al.  Automatic acquisition of inflectional lexica for morphological normalisation , 2008, Inf. Process. Manag..

[36]  Steffen Staab,et al.  Discovering Conceptual Relations from Text , 2000, ECAI.

[37]  Kecheng Liu,et al.  Semiotics in Information Systems Engineering , 2000 .

[38]  Pum-Mo Ryu.  Determining the Specificity of Terms using Compositional and Contextual Information , 2004, ACL.

[39]  Dafydd Gibbon,et al.  Handbook of Multimodal and Spoken Dialogue Systems: Resources, Terminology and Product Evaluation , 2000, Computational Linguistics.

[40]  Didier Bourigault,et al.  Surface Grammatical Analysis for the Extraction of Terminological Noun Phrases , 1992, COLING.

[41]  Hideki Mima,et al.  Automatic recognition of multi-word terms:. the C-value/NC-value method , 2000, International Journal on Digital Libraries.

[42]  Nitin Indurkhya,et al.  Handbook of Natural Language Processing , 2010 .

[43]  Daniel M. Berry,et al.  The use of a repeated phrase finder in requirements extraction , 1990, J. Syst. Softw..