Developing Thesauruses for Requirements Analysis

We have already proposed a requirements elicitation method using a domain knowledge represented by a thesaurus. However, we do not have discussed how to construct such thesauruses. In this paper, we propose a method to develop such thesauruses by using existing documents for software, such as manuals, helps and brochures. We focus on the structure within a sentence in software documents, and develop a hierarchal structure of terms, i.e. a thesaurus. Because a thesaurus is developed from several documents that are written for several different software products in the same application domain, such thesaurus can help an analyst complement requirements from users and/or customers. We evaluate our method by using it in an experiment, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages.