Towards a Semantic Representation for Functional Software Requirements

Requirements are core elements in any software project. Therefore, understanding and representing the meaning of requirements play an essential role in automating any requirement engineering task. In this paper, we propose a semantic representation, called ReqVec, for functional software requirements. ReqVec is calculated based on three main phases: First, a set of lexical and syntactic steps are performed to analyze textual requirements. Then, semantic dimensions for requirements are calculated based on a words classifier and the well-known word embedding model Word2vec. Finally, ReqVec is constructed based on the representations of these dimensions. Two experiments conducted to evaluate how the proposed ReqVec can capture meaningful semantic information to solve two well-known Requirements Engineering tasks: detecting semantic relation between requirements, and requirements categorization. The proposed representation was efficient enough to detect related requirements with 0.92 F-measure and to categorize requirements with 0.88 F-measure.