Research on NLP for RE at CNR-ISTI: A report

[Team Overview] The Formal Methods & Tools (FMT) group of CNR-ISTI focuses on the study and development of formal methods and tools to support software development processes. [Past Research] FMT started working on requirements formalisation through natural language processing (NLP) at the end of the nineties. This stream of research evolved into requirements analysis and defect detection by means of NLP, with a focus on ambiguity, and resulted in the development and application of the QuARS tool for requirements analysis. More recently, the group started working on the analysis of requirements elicitation interviews, in which ambiguity in spoken natural language and other communication defects are studied. [Research Plan] In the upcoming years, FMT will devote its effort to the diffusion of a dataset for requirements analysis, to the usage of NLP in product line engineering, and to research in NLP techniques applied to the analysis of interviews.