Analyzing Helpfulness of Online Reviews Oriented to Requirements Elicitation

With user generated content becoming mainstream in web applications,online reviews have become a novel data resource for requirements elicitation.These subjective reviews can make user needs explicit and specific through depicting the features related to user interests in a software system.The reviews can enhance the adequacy and completeness of requirements elicitation since they provide abundant data as well as expression.Moreover,the reviews without the limitations of time and space favor capturing the changes of user needs in a timely manner.Recently,the study of the helpfulness of online reviews is promising.The concept of helpfulness is technically defined as the degree to which the review quality has impact on the effective use of a review.For user requirements elicitation,the helpfulness of a review is regarded as the degree to which the software features involved in the review characterize the common concerns of most users of the software system.However,the large quantity of data and quality differences cause great difficulties in acquiring highly accurate and reliable user requirements using automatic mining technology.Hence,the key is how to accurately and effectively identify more helpful online reviews for user requirements elicitation.