Applying Ontologies and Intelligent Text Processing in Requirements Reuse

Requirements reuse plays a decisive role in order to get benefits in the software industry. The reuse process implies a retrieval of stored requirements, but these requirements are generally expressed in natural language. In order to obtain an effective but flexible system, we need a natural language retrieval system supported by a knowledge model. The knowledge of the requirements engineering area is modeled by the Requirements Engineering Ontology (REOntology), which includes lexical-syntactic patterns in order to capture the semantic of the relationships in the domain. The approach takes advantage of both techniques: domain models and natural language processing. Furthermore, it supports an incremental reuse methodology, as new requirements are semi-automatically processed in order to improve the REOntology by means of adding specific application domain knowledge step by step.