Retraining a BERT Model for Transfer Learning in Requirements Engineering: A Preliminary Study

In recent years, advanced deep learning language models such as BERT, ELMO, ULMFiT and GPT have demonstrated strong performance on many general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. BERT, in particular, has also achieved promising results on some domain-specific tasks, including the requirements classification task. However, in spite of its great potential, BERT under-performs on domain specific tasks. In this paper, we present BERT4RE, a BERT-based model retrained on requirements texts, aiming to support a wide range of requirements engineering (RE) tasks, including classifying requirements, detecting language issues, identifying key domain concepts, and establishing requirements traceability links. We demonstrate the transferability of BERT4RE, by fine-tuning it for the task of identifying key domain concepts. Our preliminary study shows that BERT4RE achieved better results than the BERT base model on the demonstrated RE task.