Software and Service Engineering Group

NLP4RE

Title: GESSI - NLP4SRE

Dates: Started on January 2021

Participation: Project coordinators Prof. Xavier Franch, Prof. Jordi Marco and Quim Motger

General Goal

Analyse and extend the scope of NLP techniques focused on supporting software and requirements engineering tasks with a particular focus on (1) requirements elicitation and release planning, (2) knowledge base generation of NLP-based software-related artefacts, and (3) user feedback analysis.

Context and Motivation

Software repositories, including software marketplaces, issue trackers and indexation services, offer a large-scale, continuously evolving catalogue of software applications and software-related NLP artefacts, including official documentation and descriptions from developers, changelogs, user reviews, and feature or bug reports. In certain contexts, like mobile applications or AI-based software products, several challenges emerge from the continuous evolution of these products. From the developer perspective, it becomes challenging to integrate effectively user feedback, both for the evolution and maintenance of their own applications as well as to keep track of the competitive landscape. From the user perspective, it becomes complex to keep track of the last, up-to-date trends on a specific market segment. The constant appearance of new products makes it challenging to analyze and select those products that better suit the user needs. However, these NLP artefacts offer a wide research opportunity to effectively and autonomously exploit user feedback to support multiple software and requirements engineering tasks. These include requirements elicitation, release planning, continuous integration, user feedback analysis and competition analysis.

In this project, we explore state-of-the-art methods and techniques in the field of NLP and we extend the scope of software engineering practices by effectively integrating these NLP tasks to improve current practices in the field.

Contact

joaquim.motger (at) upc.edu

Publications

  • Software-Based Dialogue Systems: Survey, Taxonomy, and Challenges. Motger, Q.; Franch, X.; and Marco, J. ACM Comput. Surv., 55(5): 91:1–91:42. 2023.
  • Improved Management of Issue Dependencies in Issue Trackers of Large Collaborative Projects. Raatikainen, M.; Motger, Q.; Lüders, C. M.; Franch, X.; Myllyaho, L.; Kettunen, E.; Marco, J.; Tiihonen, J.; Halonen, M.; and Männistö, T. IEEE Trans. Software Eng., 49(4): 2128–2148. 2023.
  • Mobile Feature-Oriented Knowledge Base Generation Using Knowledge Graphs. Motger, Q.; Franch, X.; and Marco, J. In Abelló, A.; Vassiliadis, P.; Romero, O.; Wrembel, R.; Bugiotti, F.; Gamper, J.; Vargas-Solar, G.; and Zumpano, E., editor(s), New Trends in Database and Information Systems - ADBIS 2023 Short Papers, Doctoral Consortium and Workshops: AIDMA, DOING, K-Gals, MADEISD, PeRS, Barcelona, Spain, September 4-7, 2023, Proceedings, volume 1850, of Communications in Computer and Information Science, pages 269–279, 2023. Springer
  • Adaptive Task-Oriented Chatbots Using Feature-Based Knowledge Bases. Campàs, C.; Motger, Q.; Franch, X.; and Marco, J. In Cabanillas, C.; and Pérez, F., editor(s), Intelligent Information Systems - CAiSE Forum 2023, Zaragoza, Spain, June 12-16, 2023, Proceedings, volume 477, of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 95–102, 2023. Springer
  • TransFeatEx: a NLP pipeline for feature extraction. Marfà, A. G.; Motger, Q.; Franch, X.; and Marco, J. In Ferrari, A.; Penzenstadler, B.; Hadar, I.; Oyedeji, S.; Abualhaija, S.; Vogelsang, A.; Deshpande, G.; Rachmann, A.; Gulden, J.; Wohlgemuth, A.; Hess, A.; Fricker, S.; Guizzardi, R. S. S.; Horkoff, J.; Perini, A.; Susi, A.; Karras, O.; Dalpiaz, F.; Moreira, A.; Amyot, D.; and Spoletini, P., editor(s), Joint Proceedings of REFSQ-2023 Workshops, Doctoral Symposium, Posters & Tools Track and Journal Early Feedback co-located with the 28th International Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2023), Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain, April 17-20, 2023, volume 3378, of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2023. CEUR-WS.org
  • Chatbots4Mobile: Feature-oriented Knowledge Base Generation Using Natural Language. Motger, Q.; Franch, X.; and Marco, J. In Ferrari, A.; Penzenstadler, B.; Hadar, I.; Oyedeji, S.; Abualhaija, S.; Vogelsang, A.; Deshpande, G.; Rachmann, A.; Gulden, J.; Wohlgemuth, A.; Hess, A.; Fricker, S.; Guizzardi, R. S. S.; Horkoff, J.; Perini, A.; Susi, A.; Karras, O.; Dalpiaz, F.; Moreira, A.; Amyot, D.; and Spoletini, P., editor(s), Joint Proceedings of REFSQ-2023 Workshops, Doctoral Symposium, Posters & Tools Track and Journal Early Feedback co-located with the 28th International Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2023), Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain, April 17-20, 2023, volume 3378, of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2023. CEUR-WS.org
  • Unveiling Competition Dynamics in Mobile App Markets through User Reviews. Motger, Q.; Franch, X.; Gervasi, V.; and Marco, J. CoRR, abs/2312.01981. 2023.
  • Integrating Adaptive Mechanisms into Mobile Applications Exploiting User Feedback. Motger, Q.; Franch, X.; and Marco, J. In Cherfi, S. S.; Perini, A.; and Nurcan, S., editor(s), Research Challenges in Information Science - 15th International Conference, RCIS 2021, Limassol, Cyprus, May 11-14, 2021, Proceedings, volume 415, of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 347–355, 2021. Springer

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