Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Requirements Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study

Understand

Natural language processing supported requirements engineering is an area of research and development that seeks to apply NLP techniques, tools and resources to a variety of requirements documents or artifacts to support a range of linguistic analysis tasks performed at various RE phases.

• Such tasks include detecting language issues, identifying key domain concepts and establishing traceability links between requirements.
• This article surveys the landscape of NLP4RE research to understand the state of the art and identify open problems.
• The systematic mapping study approach is used to conduct this survey, which identified 404 relevant primary studies and reviewed them according to five research questions, cutting across five aspects of NLP4RE research, concerning the state of the literature, the state of empirical research, the research focus, the state of the practice, and the NLP technologies used.