Improving requirements completeness: automated assistance through large language models

Abstract

Natural language (NL) is arguably the most prevalent medium for expressing systems and software requirements. Detecting incompleteness in NL requirements is a major challenge. One approach to identify incompleteness is to compare requirements with external sources. Given the rise of large language models (LLMs), an interesting question arises: Are LLMs useful external sources of knowledge for detecting potential incompleteness in NL requirements? This article explores this question by utilizing BERT. Specifically, we employ BERT’s masked language model to generate contextualized predictions for filling masked slots in requirements. To simulate incompleteness, we withhold content from the requirements and assess BERT’s ability to predict terminology that is present in the withheld content but absent in the disclosed content. BERT can produce multiple predictions per mask. Our first contribution is determining the optimal number of predictions per mask, striking a balance between effectively identifying omissions in requirements and mitigating noise present in the predictions. Our second contribution involves designing a machine learning-based filter to post-process BERT’s predictions and further reduce noise. We conduct an empirical evaluation using 40 requirements specifications from the PURE dataset. Our findings indicate that: (1) BERT’s predictions effectively highlight terminology that is missing from requirements, (2) BERT outperforms simpler baselines in identifying relevant yet missing terminology, and (3) our filter reduces noise in the predictions, enhancing BERT’s effectiveness for completeness checking of requirements.