SANAYOJAN: a framework for traceability link recovery between use-cases in software requirement specification and regulatory documents

User requirement specification (URS) documents written in the form of free-form natural language text contain system use-case descriptions as one of the elements in the URS. For a few application domains, some of the system use-cases in SRS define services and functionality which needs to comply with law, rules and regulations pertaining to the application domain. In this paper, we present a multi-step approach to automatically extract system use-cases from URS and construct traceability links between system-uses and appropriate regulations in the regulatory documents. We define lexicon-based, syntactic and semantic features to discriminate system use-cases from other elements in the SRS. We investigate the application of five semantic similarity methods implemented in the SEMILAR semantic similarity toolkit to compute similarity between a given system use-case with regulations in a regulatory document. We conduct a series of experiments on real-world data obtained from software projects of a large global Information Technology (IT) services company to validate the proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness (accuracy of 83.3% for system use-case extraction and 72% for constructing traceability links) and limitations of the proposed approach.