Abstract:
User requirement speci cation (URS) documents written in the form of free-form natural lan-
guage text contain system use-case descriptions as one of the elements in the URS. For few
application domains, some of the system use-cases in URS de ne services and functionality
which needs to comply with regulations pertaining to the application domain. In this paper, we
present a multi-step approach to automatically extract system use-cases from URS and construct
traceability links between system-uses and appropriate regulations in the regulatory documents.
We de ne lexicon-based, syntactic and semantic features to discriminate system use-cases from
other elements in the URS. We investigate the application of ve semantic similarity methods
implemented in the SEMILAR semantic similarity toolkit to compute similarity between a given
system use-case with regulations in a regulatory document. We conduct a series of experiments
on real-world data obtained from software projects of a large global Information Technology (IT)
services company to validate the proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate e ec-
tiveness (accuracy of 83:3% for system use-case extraction and 72% for constructing traceability
links) and limitations of the proposed approach.
