A Tertiary Study on AI for Requirements Engineering

Abstract

Context and Motivation: Rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have significantly influenced requirements engineering (RE) practices. Problem: While many recent secondary studies have explored AI’s role in RE, a thorough understanding of the use of AI for RE (AI4RE) and its inherent challenges remains in its early stages.Principal Ideas: To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a tertiary review on understanding how AI assists RE practices. Contribution: We analyzed 28 secondary studies from 2017 to September 2023 about using AI in RE tasks such as elicitation, classification, analysis, specification, management, and tracing. Our study reveals a trend of combining natural language process techniques with machine learning models like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Naive Bayes, and a surge in using large language models (LLMs) for RE. The study also identified challenges of AI4RE related to ambiguity, language, data, algorithm, and evaluation. The study gives topics for future research, particularly for researchers who want to start new research in this field.