Analyzing the Impact of Machine Learning Algorithms on Software Requirements Classification

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21015/vtse.v13i1.2051

Abstract

Along with the rapid growth of the world, the demand for efficient and successful software has increased swiftly. Any software has many steps for developing software and the most important step is software requirements engineering. Requirements classification can be applied manually, which requires great effort, time, and cost and the accuracy may vary. Many previous studies utilized machine learning algorithms to automate the classification process but traditional classification algorithms often require a large amount of labeled data, which can be expensive and time-consuming to collect. Few-Shot Learning (FSL) excels in situations with limited data, making it a promising alternative. This paper investigates the potential of applying Few-Shot Learning (FSL) algorithms for classifying software requirements. This study explores three prominent FSL algorithms: Prototypical Networks, Matching Networks, and Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML). These algorithms are evaluated on their ability to classify software requirements using a publicly available dataset. The results demonstrate that Prototypical Networks outperforms Matching Networks and MAML in this specific application. Matching Networks, designed for visual similarity tasks, struggle with textual data. Prototypical Networks achieve a remarkable accuracy of 82 percent, suggesting their effectiveness in learning class representations from a small number of samples. MAML also shows promising results with an accuracy of 76.9 percent. While acknowledging limitations in data pre-processing, the study concludes that FSL holds significant potential for efficient and cost-effective software requirement classification, particularly when dealing with limited labeled data.

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Published

2025-03-18

How to Cite

Saleem, M. B., Qamar, N., Danial, R., Sardar, K., Noor, M., & Omer, U. (2025). Analyzing the Impact of Machine Learning Algorithms on Software Requirements Classification. VFAST Transactions on Software Engineering, 13(1), 88–98. https://doi.org/10.21015/vtse.v13i1.2051