How to Complete Customer Requirements: Using Concept Expansion for Requirement Refinement

One purpose of requirement refinement is that higher-level requirements have to be translated to something usable by developers. Since customer requirements are often written in natural language by end users, they lack precision, completeness and consistency. Although user stories are often used in the requirement elicitation process in order to describe the possibilities how to interact with the software, there is always something unspoken. Here, we present techniques how to automatically refine vague software descriptions. Thus, we can bridge the gap by first revising natural language utterances from higher-level to more detailed customer requirements, before functionality matters. We therefore focus on the resolution of semantically incomplete user-generated sentences (i.e. non-instantiated arguments of predicates) and provide ontology-based gap-filling suggestions how to complete unverbalized information in the user’s demand.