Canary: An Interactive and Query-Based Approach to Extract Requirements from Online Forums

Interactions among stakeholders and engineers is key to Requirements engineering (RE). Increasingly, such interactions take place online, producing large quantities of qualitative (natural language) and quantitative (e.g., votes) data. Although a rich source of requirements-related information, extracting such information from online forums can be nontrivial.We propose Canary, a tool-assisted approach, to facilitate systematic extraction of requirements-related information from online forums via high-level queries. Canary (1) adds structure to natural language content on online forums using an annotation schema combining requirements and argumentation ontologies, (2) stores the structured data in a relational database, and (3) compiles high-level queries in Canary syntax to SQL queries that can be run on the relational database.We demonstrate key steps in Canary workflow, including (1) extracting raw data from online forums, (2) applying annotations to the raw data, and (3) compiling and running interesting Canary queries that leverage the social aspect of the data.

I. Introduction

Online interactions between stakeholders and engineers, e.g., on social media and product discussion forums, contain a variety of requirements-related information. Often, such information is unorganized and too noisy to be readily valuable for RE [3]. However, our observations [2] suggest that online discussions have a naturally emerging structure that can be leveraged to extract requirements-related information. A typical discussion starts with a problem description, which can be about a missing or a poorly-implemented feature of a target application. In response to the problem, other users may propose solutions, express support, or rebut the problem or solutions by pointing out unnecessary or unfeasible aspects. In addition to discussions in natural language, online forums include information such as votes and users' reputation.