Title: ELICA: An Automated Tool for Dynamic Extraction of Requirements Relevant Information,
Abstract: Requirements elicitation requires extensive knowledge and deep understanding
of the problem domain where the final system will be situated. However, in many
software development projects, analysts are required to elicit the requirements
from an unfamiliar domain, which often causes communication barriers between
analysts and stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a requirements ELICitation
Aid tool (ELICA) to help analysts better understand the target application
domain by dynamic extraction and labeling of requirements-relevant knowledge.
To extract the relevant terms, we leverage the flexibility and power of
Weighted Finite State Transducers (WFSTs) in dynamic modeling of natural
language processing tasks. In addition to the information conveyed through
text, ELICA captures and processes non-linguistic information about the
intention of speakers such as their confidence level, analytical tone, and
emotions. The extracted information is made available to the analysts as a set
of labeled snippets with highlighted relevant terms which can also be exported
as an artifact of the Requirements Engineering (RE) process. The application
and usefulness of ELICA are demonstrated through a case study. This study shows
how pre-existing relevant information about the application domain and the
information captured during an elicitation meeting, such as the conversation
and stakeholders' intentions, can be captured and used to support analysts
achieving their tasks.