Cross-Domain Requirements Linking via Adversarial-based Domain Adaptation

Requirements linking is the core of software system maintenance and evolution, and it is critical to assuring software quality. In practice, however, the requirements links are frequently absent or incorrectly labeled, and reconstructing such ties is time-consuming and error-prone. Numerous learning-based approaches have been put forth to address the problem. However, these approaches will lose effectiveness for the Cold-Start projects with few labeled samples. To this end, we propose RADIATION, an adversarial-based domain adaptation approach for cross-domain requirements linking. Generally, RADIATION firstly adopts an IDF-based Masking strategy to filter the domain-specific features. Then it pre-trains a linking model in the source domain with sufficient labeled samples and adapts the model to target domains using a distance-enhanced adversarial technique without using any labeled target samples. Evaluation on five public datasets shows that RADIATION could achieve 66.4% precision, 89.2% recall, and significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines by 13.4%-42.9% F1. In addition, the designed components, i.e., IDF-based Masking and Distance-enhanced Loss, could significantly improve performance.