Investigating ChatGPT’s Potential to Assist in Requirements Elicitation Processes

Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Requirements Engineering (RE) (NLP4RE) seeks to apply NLP tools, techniques, and resources to the RE process to increase the quality of the requirements. There is little research involving the utilization of Generative AI-based NLP tools and techniques for requirements elicitation. In recent times, Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT have gained significant recognition due to their notably improved performance in NLP tasks. To explore the potential of ChatGPT to assist in requirements elicitation processes, we formulated six questions to elicit requirements using ChatGPT. Using the same six questions, we conducted interview-based surveys with five RE experts from academia and industry and collected 30 responses containing requirements. The quality of these 36 responses (human-formulated + ChatGPT-generated) was evaluated over seven different requirements quality attributes by another five RE experts through a second round of interview-based surveys. In comparing the quality of requirements generated by ChatGPT with those formulated by human experts, we found that ChatGPT-generated requirements are highly Abstract, Atomic, Consistent, Correct, and Understandable. Based on these results, we present the most pressing issues related to LLMs and what future research should focus on to leverage the emergent behaviour of LLMs more effectively in natural language-based RE activities.