Artificial Intelligence in Software Requirements Engineering: State-of-the-Art

Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a very important activity in the software development life cycle. Poorly executed RE steps can result in poor quality software and expensive maintenance cost. Although researchers have previously related and applied artificial intelligence (AI) to RE, little is known about the specific role of AI in RE process. In particular, there are insufficient understandings about how AI should be incorporated in the RE process to produce high quality, clear and detailed requirements. In this paper, we present the current state-of-the-art of AI in RE. We reviewed the literature published between January 2015 to December 2021 in order to understand how the state of the art of AI branches such as machine learning, classification, and natural language processing (NLP) has advanced the field of RE. Each recent study is summarized and the advancement to the RE field is presented. There is an apparent direction of applying NLP techniques and supervised learning techniques such as classification to requirements documents. This study provides a summary and direction of the AI applications in the field of RE.