Chatbot-Enhanced Requirements Resolution for Automated Service Compositions

This work addresses the automatic resolution of software requirements. In the vision of On-The-Fly Computing, software services should be composed on demand, based solely on natural language input from human users. To enable this, we build a chatbot solution that works with human-in-the-loop support to receive, analyze, correct, and complete their software requirements. The chatbot is equipped with a natural language processing pipeline and a large knowledge base, as well as sophisticated dialogue management skills to enhance the user experience. Previous solutions have focused on analyzing software requirements to point out errors such as vagueness, ambiguity, or incompleteness. Our work shows how apps can collaborate with users to efficiently produce correct requirements. We developed and compared three different chatbot apps that can work with built-in knowledge. We rely on ChatterBot, DialoGPT and Rasa for this purpose. While DialoGPT provides its own knowledge base, Rasa is the best system to combine the text mining and knowledge solutions at our disposal. The evaluation shows that users accept 73% of the suggested answers from Rasa, while they accept only 63% from DialoGPT or even 36% from ChatterBot.