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Detecting Underspecification in Software Requirements via k-NN Coverage Geometry

Software Engineering 2026-03-26 v1

Abstract

We propose \geogap{}, a geometric method for detecting missing requirement types in software specifications. The method represents each requirement as a unit vector via a pretrained sentence encoder, then measures coverage deficits through kk-nearest-neighbour distances z-scored against per-project baselines. Three complementary scoring components -- per-point geometric coverage, type-restricted distributional coverage, and annotation-free population counting -- fuse into a unified gap score controlled by two hyperparameters. On the PROMISE NFR benchmark, \geogap{} achieves 0.935 AUROC for detecting completely absent requirement types in projects with N50N \geq 50 requirements, matching a ground-truth count oracle that requires human annotation. Six baselines confirm that each pipeline component -- per-project normalisation, neural embeddings, and geometric scoring -- contributes measurable value.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.24248,
  title  = {Detecting Underspecification in Software Requirements via k-NN Coverage Geometry},
  author = {Wenyan Yang and Tomáš Janovec and Samantha Bavautdin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.24248},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:37:13.333Z