AbStFinder, a Prototype Natural Language Text Abstraction Finder for Use in Requirements Elicitation

Abstraction identification is named as a key problem in requirements analysis. Typically, the abstractions must be found among the large mass of natural language text collected from the clients and users. This paper motivates and describes a new approach, based on traditional signal processing methods, for finding abstractions in natural language text and offers a new tool, AbstFinder as an implementation of this approach. The advantages and disadvantages of the approach and the design of the tool are discussed in detail. Various scenarios for use of the tool are offered. Some of these scenarios were used in case study of the effectiveness of rhe tool on an industrial-strength example of finding abstractions in a request for proposals.