Abstract Bad requirements quality can cause expensive consequences during the software development lifecycle, especially if iterations are long and feedback comes late. We aim at a light-weight static requirements analysis approach that allows for rapid checks immediately when requirements are written down. We transfer the concept of code smells to requirements engineering as Requirements Smells . To evaluate the benefits and limitations, we define Requirements Smells, realize our concepts for a smell detection in a prototype called Smella and apply Smella in a series of cases provided by three industrial and a university context. The automatic detection yields an average precision of 59 at an average recall of 82 with high variation. The evaluation in practical environments indicates benefits such as an increase of the awareness of quality defects. Yet, some smells were not clearly distinguishable. Lightweight smell detection can uncover many practically relevant requirements defects in a reasonably precise way. Although some smells need to be defined more clearly, smell detection provides a helpful means to support quality assurance in requirements engineering, for instance, as a supplement to reviews.
One specific area of QA is avoiding redundancy and cloning. Whereas @cite_2 use ConQAT to search for syntactic identity resulting from a copy-and-paste reuse, @cite_25 aim at detecting similar content, therefore using methods from information retrieval (such as Latent Semantic Analysis @cite_57 ). @cite_51 extend this work specifically for use cases. Their tool, ReqAlign, classifies each step with a semantic abstraction of the step. These publications analyze the performance of their approaches, and depending on the artifact and methods achieve precision and recall close to 1 (see Table ).
@cite_57 @cite_51 @cite_25 @cite_2
2251143283 2108873957 1983623418 2119329316
We develop a semantic parsing framework based on semantic similarity for open domain question answering (QA). We focus on single-relation questions and decompose each question into an entity mention and a relation pattern. Using convolutional neural network models, we measure the similarity of entity mentions with entities in the knowledge base (KB) and the similarity of relation patterns and relations in the KB. We score relational triples in the KB using these measures and select the top scoring relational triple to answer the question. When evaluated on an open-domain QA task, our method achieves higher precision across different recall points compared to the previous approach, and can improve F1 by 7 points. Community-based Question Answering (cQA) is a popular online service where users can ask and answer questions on any topics. This paper is concerned with the problem of question retrieval. Question retrieval in cQA aims to find historical questions that are semantically equivalent or relevant to the queried questions. Although the translation-based language model (, 2008) has gained the state-of-the-art performance for question retrieval, they ignore the latent topic information in calculating the semantic similarity between questions. In this paper, we propose a topic model incorporated with the category information into the process of discovering the latent topics in the content of questions. Then we combine the semantic similarity based latent topics with the translation-based language model into a unified framework for question retrieval. Experiments are carried out on a real world cQA data set from Yahoo! Answers. The results show that our proposed method can significantly improve the question retrieval performance of translation-based language model. A standard approach to cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) in conjunction with a multilingual parallel aligned corpus. This approach has been shown to be successful in identifying similar documents across languages - or more precisely, retrieving the most similar document in one language to a query in another language. However, the approach has severe drawbacks when applied to a related task, that of clustering documents "language-independently", so that documents about similar topics end up closest to one another in the semantic space regardless of their language. The problem is that documents are generally more similar to other documents in the same language than they are to documents in a different language, but on the same topic. As a result, when using multilingual LSA, documents will in practice cluster by language, not by topic. We propose a novel application of PARAFAC2 (which is a variant of PARAFAC, a multi-way generalization of the singular value decomposition [SVD]) to overcome this problem. Instead of forming a single multilingual term-by-document matrix which, under LSA, is subjected to SVD, we form an irregular three-way array, each slice of which is a separate term-by-document matrix for a single language in the parallel corpus. The goal is to compute an SVD for each language such that V (the matrix of right singular vectors) is the same across all languages. Effectively, PARAFAC2 imposes the constraint, not present in standard LSA, that the "concepts" in all documents in the parallel corpus are the same regardless of language. Intuitively, this constraint makes sense, since the whole purpose of using a parallel corpus is that exactly the same concepts are expressed in the translations. We tested this approach by comparing the performance of PARAFAC2 with standard LSA in solving a particular CLIR problem. From our results, we conclude that PARAFAC2 offers a very promising alternative to LSA not only for multilingual document clustering, but also for solving other problems in cross-language information retrieval. We are concerned by the use of factorial correspondence analysis (FCA) for image retrieval. FCA is designed for analyzing contingency tables. In textual data analysis (TDA), FCA analyzes a contingency table crossing terms words and documents. To adapt FCA on images, we first define "visual words" computed from scalable invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptors in images and use them for image quantization. At this step, we can build a contingency table crossing "visual words" as terms words and images as documents. The method was tested on the Caltech4 and Stewenius and Nister datasets on which it provides better results (quality of results and execution time) than classical methods as tf * idf and probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA). To scale up and improve the retrieval quality, we propose a new retrieval schema using inverted files based on the relevant indicators of correspondence analysis (representation quality of images on axes and contribution of images to the inertia of the axes). The numerical experiments show that our algorithm performs faster than the exhaustive method without losing precision.