Zero-shot Learning for Named Entity Recognition in Software Specification Documents

Named entity recognition (NER) is a natural language processing task that has been used in Requirements Engineering for the identification of entities such as actors, actions, operators, resources, events, GUI elements, hardware, APIs, and others. NER might be particularly useful for extracting key information from Software Requirements Specification documents, which provide a blueprint for software development. However, a common challenge in this domain is the lack of annotated data. In this article, we propose and analyze two zero-shot approaches for NER in the requirements engineering domain. These are found to be particularly effective in situations where labeled data is scarce or non-existent. The first approach is a template-based zero-shot learning mechanism that uses the prompt engineering approach and achieves 93% accuracy according to our experimental results. The second solution takes an orthogonal approach by transforming the entity recognition problem into a question-answering task which results in 98% accuracy. Both zero-shot NER approaches introduced in this work perform better than the existing state-of-the-art solutions in the requirements engineering domain.