An Overview of User Feedback Classification Approaches

Online user feedback about software products is a promising source of user requirements. To allow scaling analyses to large amounts of user feedback, research on Crowd-based Requirements Engineering (CrowdRE) seeks to tailor natural language processing (NLP) techniques to Requirements Engineering (RE). Various frameworks have been proposed, but it remains largely unclear why particular NLP techniques are better suited for CrowdRE than others, which makes it hard to make a well-founded choice for a technique. We found that CrowdRE research most often uses machine learning (ML) and has so far applied twelve clusters of ML algorithms and seven clusters of ML features. The prevalent algorithm-feature pair is Na¨ive Bayes with Bag of Words - Term Frequency (BOW-TF), followed by Support Vector Machines (SVM) with BOW-TF. An initial comparison of the reported precision and recall suggests that classifications in RE need further improvement. Our research presents a preliminary overview of the current landscape of automated classification techniques for RE whose results may inspire researchers to apply new strategies to advance research in this field, or to include ML models they had not considered previously in their benchmarks.