English

Classification of Natural Language Processing Techniques for Requirements Engineering

Computation and Language 2022-04-12 v1 Software Engineering

Abstract

Research in applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to requirements engineering (RE) tasks spans more than 40 years, from initial efforts carried out in the 1980s to more recent attempts with machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. However, in spite of the progress, our recent survey shows that there is still a lack of systematic understanding and organization of commonly used NLP techniques in RE. We believe one hurdle facing the industry is lack of shared knowledge of NLP techniques and their usage in RE tasks. In this paper, we present our effort to synthesize and organize 57 most frequently used NLP techniques in RE. We classify these NLP techniques in two ways: first, by their NLP tasks in typical pipelines and second, by their linguist analysis levels. We believe these two ways of classification are complementary, contributing to a better understanding of the NLP techniques in RE and such understanding is crucial to the development of better NLP tools for RE.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.04282,
  title  = {Classification of Natural Language Processing Techniques for Requirements Engineering},
  author = {Liping Zhao and Waad Alhoshan and Alessio Ferrari and Keletso J. Letsholo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.04282},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

10 pages, 4 tables, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:42:51.804Z