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ICSE 2021
Mon 17 May - Sat 5 June 2021
Tue 25 May 2021 12:25 - 12:45 at Blended Sessions Room 4 - 1.2.4. Software Requirements Chair(s): Birgit Penzenstadler
Wed 26 May 2021 00:25 - 00:45 at Blended Sessions Room 4 - 1.2.4. Software Requirements

Ambiguity in natural-language requirements is a pervasive issue that has been studied by the requirements engineering community for more than two decades. A fully manual approach for addressing ambiguity in requirements is tedious and time-consuming, and may further overlook unacknowledged ambiguity – the situation where different stakeholders perceive a requirement as unambiguous but, in reality, interpret the requirement differently. In this paper, we propose an automated approach that uses natural language processing for handling ambiguity in requirements. Our approach is based on the automatic generation of a domain-specific corpus from Wikipedia. Integrating domain knowledge, as we show in our evaluation, leads to a significant positive improvement in the accuracy of ambiguity detection and interpretation. We scope our work to coordination ambiguity (CA) and prepositional-phrase attachment ambiguity (PAA) because of the prevalence of these types of ambiguity in natural-language requirements. We evaluate our approach on 20 industrial requirements documents. These documents collectively contain more than 5000 requirements from seven distinct application domains. Over this dataset, our approach detects CA and PAA with an average precision of approximately 80% and an average recall of approximately 89% (approximately 90% for cases of unacknowledged ambiguity). The automatic interpretations that our approach yields have an average accuracy of approximately 85%. Compared to baselines that use generic corpora, our approach, which uses domain-specific corpora, has approximately 33% better accuracy in ambiguity detection and approximately 16% better accuracy in interpretation.

Tue 25 May

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

12:05 - 13:15
12:05
20m
Paper
How to identify Boundary Conditions with Contrasty Metric?Technical Track
Technical Track
Weilin Luo Sun Yat-sen University, Hai Wan School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Xiaotong Song School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Binhao Yang School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Hongzhen Zhong School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Yin Chen Department of Computer Science, South China Normal University
Pre-print Media Attached
12:25
20m
Paper
Using Domain-specific Corpora for Improved Handling of Ambiguity in RequirementsArtifact ReusableTechnical TrackArtifact Available
Technical Track
Saad Ezzini University of Luxembourg, Sallam Abualhaija University of Luxembourg, Chetan Arora Deakin University, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh EECS, University of Ottawa, Lionel Briand University of Luxembourg and University of Ottawa
Pre-print Media Attached
12:45
15m
Paper
Investigating the potential impact of values on requirements and software engineeringSEIS
SEIS - Software Engineering in Society
Alistair Sutcliffe University of Aston, Peter Sawyer Aston University, Wei Liu King's College London, Nelly Bencomo Aston University
Pre-print Media Attached
13:00
15m
Paper
Validation Obligations: A Novel Approach to check Compliance between Requirements and their Formal SpecificationNIER
NIER - New Ideas and Emerging Results
Atif Mashkoor Johannes Kepler University Linz, Michael Leuschel HHU, Alexander Egyed Johannes Kepler University
Pre-print Media Attached

Wed 26 May

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

00:05 - 01:15
00:05
20m
Paper
How to identify Boundary Conditions with Contrasty Metric?Technical Track
Technical Track
Weilin Luo Sun Yat-sen University, Hai Wan School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Xiaotong Song School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Binhao Yang School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Hongzhen Zhong School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Yin Chen Department of Computer Science, South China Normal University
Pre-print Media Attached
00:25
20m
Paper
Using Domain-specific Corpora for Improved Handling of Ambiguity in RequirementsArtifact ReusableTechnical TrackArtifact Available
Technical Track
Saad Ezzini University of Luxembourg, Sallam Abualhaija University of Luxembourg, Chetan Arora Deakin University, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh EECS, University of Ottawa, Lionel Briand University of Luxembourg and University of Ottawa
Pre-print Media Attached
00:45
15m
Paper
Investigating the potential impact of values on requirements and software engineeringSEIS
SEIS - Software Engineering in Society
Alistair Sutcliffe University of Aston, Peter Sawyer Aston University, Wei Liu King's College London, Nelly Bencomo Aston University
Pre-print Media Attached
01:00
15m
Paper
Validation Obligations: A Novel Approach to check Compliance between Requirements and their Formal SpecificationNIER
NIER - New Ideas and Emerging Results
Atif Mashkoor Johannes Kepler University Linz, Michael Leuschel HHU, Alexander Egyed Johannes Kepler University
Pre-print Media Attached