The application of AI techniques in requirements classification: a systematic mapping

Abstract

Requirement Analysis is the essential sub-field of requirements engineering (RE). From the last decade, numerous automatic techniques are widely exploited in requirements analysis. In this context, requirements identification and classification is challenging for RE community, especially in context of large corpus and app review. As a consequence, several Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques such as Machine learning (ML), Deep learning (DL) and transfer learning (TL)) have been proposed to reduce the manual efforts of requirement engineer. Although, these approaches reported promising results than traditional automated techniques, but the knowledge of their applicability in real-life and actual use of these approaches is yet incomplete. The main objective of this paper is to systematically investigate and better understand the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in identification and classification of software requirements. This study conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) and collect the primary studies on the use of AI techniques in requirements classification. (1) this study found that 60 studies are published that adopted automated techniques in requirements classification. The reported results indicate that transfer learning based approaches extensively used in classification and yielding most accurate results and outperforms the other ML and DL techniques. (2) The data extraction process of SLR indicates that Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are widely used in selected studies. (3) Precision and Recall are the commonly used metrics for evaluating the performance of automated techniques. This paper revealed that while these AI approaches reported promising results in classification. The applicability of these existing techniques in complex and real-world settings has not been reported yet. This SLR calls for the urge for the close alliance between RE and AI techniques to handle the open issues confronted in the development of some real-world automated system.