On the Applicability of Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Software Requirement Analysis

The applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods especially machine learning techniques have increased in recent years. Classification algorithms have been successfully applied to different problems such as requirement classification. Although these algorithms have good performance, most of them cannot explain how they make a decision. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a set of new techniques that explain the predictions of machine learning algorithms. In this work, the applicability of XAI for software requirement classification is studied. An explainable software requirement classifier is presented using the LIME algorithm. The explainability of the proposed method is studied by applying it to the PROMISE software requirement dataset. The results show that XAI can help the analyst or requirement specifier to better understand why a specific requirement is classified as functional or non-functional. The important keywords for such decisions are identified and analyzed in detail. The experimental study shows that the XAI can be used to help analysts and requirement specifiers to better understand the predictions of the classifiers for categorizing software requirements. Also, the effect of the XAI on feature reduction is analyzed. The results showed that the XAI model has a positive role in feature analysis.