Reading between the Lines: Information Extraction from Industry Requirements

Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 703–711 Varna, Sep 4–6, 2023 https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-092-2_076 703 Reading Between the Lines: Information Extraction from Industry Requirements Ole Magnus Holter University of Oslo / Norway olemholt@ifi.uio.no Basil Ell University of Oslo / Norway Bielefeld University / Germany basile@ifi.uio.no Abstract Industry requirements describe the qualities that a project or a service must provide. Most requirements are, however, only available in natural language format and are embed- ded in textual documents. To be machine- understandable, a requirement needs to be rep- resented in a logical format. We consider that a requirement consists of a scope, which is the requirement’s subject matter, a condition, which is any condition that must be fulfilled for the requirement to be relevant, and a demand, which is what is required. We introduce a novel task, the identification of the semantic com- ponents scope, condition, and demand in a requirement sentence, and establish baselines using sequence labelling and few-shot learning. One major challenge with this task is the im- plicit nature of the scope, often not stated in the sentence. By including document context information, we improved the average perfor- mance for scope detection. Our study provides insights into the difficulty of machine under- standing of industry requirements and suggests strategies for addressing this challenge. 1 Introduction Requirements are a critical part of the development process for products and services. They are docu- mented descriptions of the physical or functional qualities that a product or a service must have. In industry, requirements serve as a means of commu- nication between contractors and manufacturers, defining what is expected to be built and the quality standards to be met. Governments and interna- tional organizations may also impose requirements to ensure compliance with rules, regulations and standards. Requirements are included as part of the contract between two parties, making adherence to them a legal obligation. Violating the requirements can lead to legal implications and financial losses, underscoring the importance of careful specifica- tion and adherence to requirements throughout the development process. A requirement is typically associated with a spe- cific piece of equipment that needs to be built which is referred to as the scope of the requirement. How- ever, a requirement may only be relevant if certain conditions are met, which will be referred to as condition. The demand of the requirement is a feature or quality the scope must possess. As an example, consider the requirement equipment with a weight of more than 1000 kg shall have a weight certificate. Here, the scope is equipment, while the condition is with a weight of more than 1000 kg, and the demand is to have a weight certificate. Most requirements are expressed as natural lan- guage text and are embedded in documents. These documents often have a hierarchical structure with chapters, sections, and other headings, which pro- vide important context for understanding the re- quirements. When the number of requirements documented in this way increases, managing and maintaining these documents becomes a significant …

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