Analysis of Requirements-Related Arguments in User Forums

In the past, users were asked to express their needs and intentions by writing a structured requirements document in natural language. Due to the pervasive use of online forums and social media, user feedback is more accessible today. However, the information obtained is often fragmented, involving multipleperspectives from multiple parties on an on-going basis. In this paper, we propose a Crowd-based Requirements Engineering approach by Argumentation (CrowdRE-Arg), which analyses the conversations from user forum, identifies the arguments in favor or opposing of a given requirements related discussion topic. By generating the argumentation model of the involved user statements, we are able to recover the conflicting viewpoints, to reason about the winning arguments for informed requirements decisions. The proposed approach is illustrated with a data set of sample conversations about the design of a new Google-Map feature from Reddit. Also, we apply natural language processing techniques and machine learning algorithms to support the automated execution of the CrowdRE-Arg approach.