Handbook on natural language processing for requirements engineering: overview

Natural language processing (NLP) has played an important role in several computer science areas, and requirements engineering (RE) is not an exception. For more than 20 years, several works have been published on the application of NLP techniques to address RE-specific tasks, such as traceability, classification, defect detection and more. In recent years, the advent of massive and heterogeneous natural language (NL) RE-relevant sources, like tweets and app reviews, has increased the interest of the RE community in NLP. Furthermore, we witness a novel golden age of NLP technologies, enabled first by transformers, such as BERT, and more recently by large language models (LLMs), such as the GPT series and the Llama family. These developments offer the opportunity to solve long-standing RE tasks. Moreover, industrial case studies on NLP applications to RE problems also show that available NLP technologies are becoming increasingly industry ready. This book targets researchers and practitioners with a background in software engineering or information systems and presents a complete overview of the settled knowledge on NLP for RE. Its objective is to serve as a reference handbook for anyone interested in starting a journey in this field. This chapter introduces the book and provides an overview of its structure to guide the reader through the chapters.