Automated Extraction and Clustering of Requirements Glossary Terms

A glossary is an important part of any software requirements document. By making explicit the technical terms in a domain and providing definitions for them, a glossary helps mitigate imprecision and ambiguity. A key step in building a glossary is to decide upon the terms to include in the glossary and to find any related terms. Doing so manually is laborious, particularly for large requirements documents. In this article, we develop an automated approach for extracting candidate glossary terms and their related terms from natural language requirements documents. Our approach differs from existing work on term extraction mainly in that it clusters the extracted terms by relevance, instead of providing a flat list of terms. We provide an automated, mathematically-based procedure for selecting the number of clusters. This procedure makes the underlying clustering algorithm transparent to users, thus alleviating the need for any user-specified parameters. To evaluate our approach, we report on three industrial case studies, as part of which we also examine the perceptions of the involved subject matter experts about the usefulness of our approach. Our evaluation notably suggests that: (1) Over requirements documents, our approach is more accurate than major generic term extraction tools. Specifically, in our case studies, our approach leads to gains of 20 percent or more in terms of recall when compared to existing tools, while at the same time either improving precision or leaving it virtually unchanged. And, (2) the experts involved in our case studies find the clusters generated by our approach useful as an aid for glossary construction.

1 Introduction

A requirements glossary makes explicit and provides definitions for the salient terms in a requirements document. A requirements glossary may further provide information about the synonyms, related terms, and example usages of the salient terms. The stakeholders of a system may consult the requirements glossary for various reasons, e.g., to familiarize themselves with the technical terms in the system’s domain, to learn about everyday words that may have a specific meaning in the system, to look up abbreviations and related terms, and to understand terminology variations.