Semantic frame embeddings for detecting relations between software requirements

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 stakeholders' 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 frame embeddings built upon pre-trained vectors, our proposed frame embeddings obtained better performance against judgments of an RE expert. These encouraging results demonstrate the potential of the resource in supporting RE analysis tasks (e.g., traceability), which we plan to investigate as part of our immediate future work.