Automated Handling of Anaphoric Ambiguity in Requirements: A Multi-solution Study

in In Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'22), Pittsburgh, PA, USA 22-27 May 2022 (2022, May)

Ambiguity is a pervasive issue in natural-language requirements. A common source of ambiguity in requirements is when a pronoun is anaphoric. In requirements engineering, anaphoric ambiguity occurs when a ... [more ▼]

Ambiguity is a pervasive issue in natural-language requirements. A common source of ambiguity in requirements is when a pronoun is anaphoric. In requirements engineering, anaphoric ambiguity occurs when a pronoun can plausibly refer to different entities and thus be interpreted differently by different readers. In this paper, we develop an accurate and practical automated approach for handling anaphoric ambiguity in requirements, addressing both ambiguity detection and anaphora interpretation. In view of the multiple competing natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technologies that one can utilize, we simultaneously pursue six alternative solutions, empirically assessing each using a collection of ~1,350 industrial requirements. The alternative solution strategies that we consider are natural choices induced by the existing technologies; these choices frequently arise in other automation tasks involving natural-language requirements. A side-by-side empirical examination of these choices helps develop insights about the usefulness of different state-of-the-art NLP and ML technologies for addressing requirements engineering problems. For the ambiguity detection task, we observe that supervised ML outperforms both a large-scale language model, SpanBERT (a variant of BERT), as well as a solution assembled from off-the-shelf NLP coreference resolvers. In contrast, for anaphora interpretation, SpanBERT yields the most accurate solution. In our evaluation, (1) the best solution for anaphoric ambiguity detection has an average precision of ~60% and a recall of 100%, and (2) the best solution for anaphora interpretation (resolution) has an average success rate of ~98%. [less ▲]

TAPHSIR: Towards AnaPHoric Ambiguity Detection and ReSolution In Requirements

in ACM SIGSOFT CONFERENCE ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (2022)

We introduce TAPHSIR -- a tool for anaphoric ambiguity detection and anaphora resolution in requirements. TAPHSIR facilities reviewing the use of pronouns in a requirements specification and revising ... [more ▼]

We introduce TAPHSIR -- a tool for anaphoric ambiguity detection and anaphora resolution in requirements. TAPHSIR facilities reviewing the use of pronouns in a requirements specification and revising those pronouns that can lead to misunderstandings during the development process. To this end, TAPHSIR detects the requirements which have potential anaphoric ambiguity and further attempts interpreting anaphora occurrences automatically. TAPHSIR employs a hybrid solution composed of an ambiguity detection solution based on machine learning and an anaphora resolution solution based on a variant of the BERT language model. Given a requirements specification, TAPHSIR decides for each pronoun occurrence in the specification whether the pronoun is ambiguous or unambiguous, and further provides an automatic interpretation for the pronoun. The output generated by TAPHSIR can be easily reviewed and validated by requirements engineers. TAPHSIR is publicly available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5902117). [less ▲]

Using Domain-specific Corpora for Improved Handling of Ambiguity in Requirements

in In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'21), Madrid 25-28 May 2021 (2021, May)

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 ... [more ▼]

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 [1]. 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 80% and an average recall of 89% (90% for cases of unacknowledged ambiguity). The automatic interpretations that our approach yields have an average accuracy of 85%. Compared to baselines that use generic corpora, our approach, which uses domain-specific corpora, has 33% better accuracy in ambiguity detection and 16% better accuracy in interpretation. [less ▲]

Dynamic Adaptation of Software-defined Networks for IoT Systems: A Search-based Approach

in Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS'20) (2020, May)

The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the development of many complex and critical systems such as smart emergency management systems. IoT-enabled applications typically depend on a ... [more ▼]

The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the development of many complex and critical systems such as smart emergency management systems. IoT-enabled applications typically depend on a communication network for transmitting large volumes of data in unpredictable and changing environments. These networks are prone to congestion when there is a burst in demand, e.g., as an emergency situation is unfolding, and therefore rely on configurable software-defined networks (SDN). In this paper, we propose a dynamic adaptive SDN configuration approach for IoT systems. The approach enables resolving congestion in real time while minimizing network utilization, data transmission delays and adaptation costs. Our approach builds on existing work in dynamic adaptive search-based software engineering (SBSE) to reconfigure an SDN while simultaneously ensuring multiple quality of service criteria. We evaluate our approach on an industrial national emergency management system, which is aimed at detecting disasters and emergencies, and facilitating recovery and rescue operations by providing first responders with a reliable communication infrastructure. Our results indicate that (1) our approach is able to efficiently and effectively adapt an SDN to dynamically resolve congestion, and (2) compared to two baseline data forwarding algorithms that are static and non-adaptive, our approach increases data transmission rate by a factor of at least 3 and decreases data loss by at least 70%. [less ▲]