Cross-Reference Detector (OpenReq-CR)

GitHub: https://github.com/OpenReqEU/cross-reference-detection

The OpenReq Cross-Reference detector component (OpenReq-CR for short) aims to identify the natural language expressions that denote cross references, i.e., a piece of text within a document which refers to related information elsewhere, in the same or different document. An example of such expression would be “This decision [referring to the previous requirement] has been taken due to the requirements stated in section 5.1”.

We have manually identified natural language patterns that are used in requirements text to refer to other requirements. We used as source for the identification of the patterns different requirements specifications of two OpenReq trials. The identified patterns were used to construct a grammar (see Figure 1 for an excerpt). When OpenReq-CR is called, the requirements enter a natural language processing pipeline and then the grammar is applied to identify the explicit dependencies.

Figure 1: Grammar excerpt used in OpenReq-CR