Anaphoric Ambiguity Resolution in Software Requirement Texts

Abstract

In requirements engineering (RE), anaphoric ambiguity is a frequent cause of misunderstandings. It can have a detrimental effect on the quality of requirements and jeopardize the success of a project. If stakeholders of the system, such as testers, developers, or customers, have different understandings or interpretations of software requirements, the system may not be accepted during customer validation. Despite its significance, there has been limited investigation into anaphoric ambiguity in RE. However, focusing on both recognizing and solving uncertainty can be more advantageous than just identifying it. Therefore we investigated the effectiveness of various QA learning techniques including encoder-based and text generation-based NLP models for two goals. We conduct detailed numerical experiments using various transformer models on two public requirements datasets and one generic dataset. Our results indicated that our QA architecture exhibits superior performance compared to baseline models in detecting ambiguity as well as resolving anaphora in contrast to other baseline approaches. We showed that our developed architecture can automatically support requirement development to minimize interpretation risk between stakeholders. © 2023 IEEE.