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ICSE 2023
Sun 14 - Sat 20 May 2023 Melbourne, Australia

Software systems are increasingly subject to regulatory compliance. Extracting compliance requirements from regulations is challenging. Ideally, locating compliance-related information in a regulation requires a joint effort from requirements engineers and legal experts, whose availability is limited. However, regulations are typically long documents spanning hundreds of pages, containing legal jargon, applying complicated natural language structures, and including cross-references, thus making their analysis effort-intensive. In this paper, we propose an automated question-answering (QA) approach that assists requirements engineers in finding the legal text passages relevant to compliance requirements. Our approach utilizes large-scale language models fine-tuned for QA, including BERT and three variants. We evaluate our approach on 107 question-answer pairs, manually curated by subject-matter experts, for four different European regulatory documents. Among these documents is the general data protection regulation (GDPR) – a major source for privacy-related requirements. Our empirical results show that, in ≈ 94 % of the cases, our approach finds the text passage containing the answer to a given question among the top five passages that our approach marks as most relevant. Further, our approach successfully demarcates, in the selected passage, the right answer with an average accuracy of ≈ 91%.

Thu 18 May

Displayed time zone: Hobart change

11:00 - 12:30
11:00
15m
Talk
AI-based Question Answering Assistance for Analyzing Natural-language Requirements
Technical Track
Saad Ezzini Lancaster University, Sallam Abualhaija University of Luxembourg, Chetan Arora Monash University, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh University of Ottawa
Pre-print
11:15
15m
Talk
Strategies, Benefits and Challenges of App Store-inspired Requirements Elicitation
Technical Track
Alessio Ferrari CNR-ISTI, Paola Spoletini Kennesaw State University
Pre-print
11:30
15m
Talk
BARA: A Dynamic State-based Serious Game for Teaching Requirements Elicitation
SEET - Software Engineering Education and Training
Yu Liu Beijing University of Technology, Tong Li Beijing University of Technology, Zheqing Huang Beijing University of Technology, Zhen Yang Beijing University of Technology
11:45
15m
Experience report
Hackathons as Inclusive Spaces for Prototyping Software in Open Social Innovation with NGOs
SEIS - Software Engineering in Society
12:00
15m
Talk
Theory as a Source of Software Requirements
Showcase
Ruzanna Chitchyan University of Bristol
12:15
15m
Talk
Automated Question Answering for Improved Understanding of Compliance Requirements: A Multi-Document Study
Showcase
Sallam Abualhaija University of Luxembourg, Chetan Arora Monash University, Amin Sleimi SnT, University of Luxembourg, Lionel Briand University of Luxembourg; University of Ottawa