Requirement Dependency Extraction Based on Improved Stacking Ensemble Machine Learning

Abstract

To address the cost and efficiency issues of manually analysing requirement dependency in requirements engineering, a requirement dependency extraction method based on part-of-speech features and an improved stacking ensemble learning model (P-Stacking) is proposed. Firstly, to overcome the problem of singularity in the feature extraction process, this paper integrates part-of-speech features, TF-IDF features, and Word2Vec features during the feature selection stage. The particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to allocate weights to part-of-speech tags, which enhances the significance of crucial information in requirement texts. Secondly, to overcome the performance limitations of standalone machine learning models, an improved stacking model is proposed. The Low Correlation Algorithm and Grid Search Algorithms are utilized in P-stacking to automatically select the optimal combination of the base models, which reduces manual intervention and improves prediction performance. The experimental results show that compared with the method based on TF-IDF features, the highest F1 scores of a standalone machine learning model in the three datasets were improved by 3.89%, 10.68%, and 21.4%, respectively, after integrating part-of-speech features and Word2Vec features. Compared with the method based on a standalone machine learning model, the improved stacking ensemble machine learning model improved F1 scores by 2.29%, 5.18%, and 7.47% in the testing and evaluation of three datasets, respectively.