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Main Authors: Bhatt, Meet, Boilard, Nic, Chaudhary, Muhammad Rehan, Thompson, Cole, Idoko, Jacob, Sorathiya, Aakash, Ginde, Gouri
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21532
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author Bhatt, Meet
Boilard, Nic
Chaudhary, Muhammad Rehan
Thompson, Cole
Idoko, Jacob
Sorathiya, Aakash
Ginde, Gouri
author_facet Bhatt, Meet
Boilard, Nic
Chaudhary, Muhammad Rehan
Thompson, Cole
Idoko, Jacob
Sorathiya, Aakash
Ginde, Gouri
contents Natural language processing (NLP) techniques have been widely applied in the requirements engineering (RE) field to support tasks such as classification and ambiguity detection. Although RE research is rooted in empirical investigation, it has paid limited attention to replicating NLP for RE (NLP4RE) studies. The rapidly advancing realm of NLP is creating new opportunities for efficient, machine-assisted workflows, which can bring new perspectives and results to the forefront. Thus, we replicate and extend a previous NLP4RE study (baseline), "Classifying User Requirements from Online Feedback in Small Dataset Environments using Deep Learning", which evaluated different deep learning models for requirement classification from user reviews. We reproduced the original results using publicly released source code, thereby helping to strengthen the external validity of the baseline study. We then extended the setup by evaluating model performance on an external dataset and comparing results to a GPT-4o zero-shot classifier. Furthermore, we prepared the replication study ID-card for the baseline study, important for evaluating replication readiness. Results showed diverse reproducibility levels across different models, with Naive Bayes demonstrating perfect reproducibility. In contrast, BERT and other models showed mixed results. Our findings revealed that baseline deep learning models, BERT and ELMo, exhibited good generalization capabilities on an external dataset, and GPT-4o showed performance comparable to traditional baseline machine learning models. Additionally, our assessment confirmed the baseline study's replication readiness; however missing environment setup files would have further enhanced readiness. We include this missing information in our replication package and provide the replication study ID-card for our study to further encourage and support the replication of our study.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21532
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automatic Classification of User Requirements from Online Feedback -- A Replication Study
Bhatt, Meet
Boilard, Nic
Chaudhary, Muhammad Rehan
Thompson, Cole
Idoko, Jacob
Sorathiya, Aakash
Ginde, Gouri
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Natural language processing (NLP) techniques have been widely applied in the requirements engineering (RE) field to support tasks such as classification and ambiguity detection. Although RE research is rooted in empirical investigation, it has paid limited attention to replicating NLP for RE (NLP4RE) studies. The rapidly advancing realm of NLP is creating new opportunities for efficient, machine-assisted workflows, which can bring new perspectives and results to the forefront. Thus, we replicate and extend a previous NLP4RE study (baseline), "Classifying User Requirements from Online Feedback in Small Dataset Environments using Deep Learning", which evaluated different deep learning models for requirement classification from user reviews. We reproduced the original results using publicly released source code, thereby helping to strengthen the external validity of the baseline study. We then extended the setup by evaluating model performance on an external dataset and comparing results to a GPT-4o zero-shot classifier. Furthermore, we prepared the replication study ID-card for the baseline study, important for evaluating replication readiness. Results showed diverse reproducibility levels across different models, with Naive Bayes demonstrating perfect reproducibility. In contrast, BERT and other models showed mixed results. Our findings revealed that baseline deep learning models, BERT and ELMo, exhibited good generalization capabilities on an external dataset, and GPT-4o showed performance comparable to traditional baseline machine learning models. Additionally, our assessment confirmed the baseline study's replication readiness; however missing environment setup files would have further enhanced readiness. We include this missing information in our replication package and provide the replication study ID-card for our study to further encourage and support the replication of our study.
title Automatic Classification of User Requirements from Online Feedback -- A Replication Study
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21532