On the role of the nouns in IR-based traceability recovery

The intensive human effort needed to manually manage traceability information has increased the interest in utilising semi-automated traceability recovery techniques. This paper presents a simple way to improve the accuracy of traceability recovery methods based on information retrieval techniques. The proposed method acts on the artefact indexing considering only the nouns contained in the artefact content to define the semantics of an artefact. The rationale behind such a choice is that the language used in software documents can be classified as a sectorial language, where the terms that provide more indication on the semantics of a document are the nouns. The results of a reported case study demonstrate that the proposed artefact indexing significantly improves the accuracy of traceability recovery methods based on the probabilistic or vector space based IR models.