ORSIM: Integrating Existing Software Components to Detect Similar Natural Language Requirements

[Context & motivation] Requirements Engineering (RE) is considered as one of the most critical phases in software development. Inside RE, interdependency detection and requirements reuse are areas that could be improved and that have been of interest for the research community. [Problem] Similarity detection is an activity that emerges in the context of natural language requirements. This activity can be used for interdependency detection and requirements reuse. Although there exist several software components to detect similar texts in English, creating the setup to test them is time-consuming and difficult. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we present ORSIM (OpenReq-Similarity), a tool which integrates different existing similarity detection components in the same platform. These components are: Cortical, Gensim, ParallelDots, and Semilar. [Contribution] ORSIM enables requirements engineers to concentrate on evaluating and choosing the similarity detection component that best suits their user’s data rather than worrying about the technical setup of these components.