4th Workshop on Natural Language Processing
for Requirements Engineering (NLP4RE’21)
Sallam Abualhaija1 , Fatma Başak Aydemir2 , Alessio Ferrari3 and Jin Guo4
1
  University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
2
  Boğaziçi University, Turkey
3
  CNR-ISTI, Pisa, Italy
4
  McGill University, Canada




1. Preface
Natural language processing (NLP) plays an important role in several areas of software engi-
neering, and requirements engineering (RE) is not an exception. Requirements are generally
authored and communicated in textual form and in different levels of formality, from structured
(e.g., user stories) to unstructured natural language. In the last few years, the advent of massive
and heterogeneous sources, such as tweets and app reviews, has attracted even more interest
from the RE community, as demonstrated by the increasing number of scientific papers on this
topic in conferences like ICSE, RE, and REFSQ. Furthermore, the possibility to integrate textual
data with other sources of information, as voice, biofeedback, and graphical languages that is
made possible by novel technologies, further increases the potential impact of NLP4RE research.
   The Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering Workshop (NLP4RE) was
established in 2018 as a venue to foster communication between researchers and practitioners
interested in the field. The 2021 edition was held virtually in Essen, due to the COVID-19
pandemic, and saw the presentation of 10 papers covering different aspects of NLP4RE, including
information extraction (e.g., rationale, causality), requirements classification and chat-bots. The
workshop saw a lively participation, with over 25 participants during the keynote and about 20
participants during the paper presentation sessions.
   The special theme of the workshop was All Languages are Natural Languages, as the organis-
ers wanted to extend the scope of NLP4RE to account also for works on low-resource languages,
but also graphical languages, and multi-modal data that can be used as sources of information
in RE.
   NLP4RE also included a keynote from Sarah C. Gregory, from Intel, titled Codeswitching,
Identity and Propelling RE Practice. The keynote highlighted the need for NLP4RE researchers to

In: F.B. Aydemir, C. Gralha, S. Abualhaija, T. Breaux, M. Daneva, N. Ernst, A. Ferrari, X. Franch, S. Ghanavati, E.
Groen, R. Guizzardi, J. Guo, A. Herrmann, J. Horkoff, P. Mennig, E. Paja, A. Perini, N. Seyff, A. Susi, A. Vogelsang
(eds.): Joint Proceedings of REFSQ-2021 Workshops, OpenRE, Posters and Tools Track, and Doctoral Symposium, Essen,
Germany, 12-04-2021
" sallam.abualhaija@uni.lu (S. Abualhaija); basak.aydemir@boun.edu.tr (F. B. Aydemir);
alessio.ferrari@isti.cnr.it (A. Ferrari); jguo@cs.mcgill.ca (J. Guo)
                                       © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
    CEUR
    Workshop
    Proceedings
                  http://ceur-ws.org
                  ISSN 1613-0073
                                       CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
change language and viewpoint when speaking with practitioners. Sarah suggested researchers
to simplify their communication—do Power Point slides, not papers!—to achieve impact and
support cross-fertilization, and recommended to create Webinars or other forms of meetings
where academia and industry can meet on a regular basis without the barrier of the scientific
conference.


2. Program Committee
We warmly thank all the reviewers of our Program Committee (PC), who helped in the selection
of the papers by providing timely and accurate reviews. The PC members of NLP4RE’21 are:

    • Chetan Arora, Deakin University, Australia
    • Dan Berry, University of Waterloo, Canada
    • Andrea Cimi no, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy
    • Fabiano Dalpiaz, Utrecht University, Netherlands
    • Henning Femmer, Qualicen GmbH, Germany
    • Xavier Franch, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
    • Davide Fucci, HITec, University of Hamburg, Germany
    • Vincenzo Gervasi, University of Pisa, Italy
    • Sepideh Ghanavati, University of Maine, USA
    • Stefania Gnesi, ISTI-CNR, Italy
    • Eduard Groen, Fraunhofer, Germany
    • Frank Houdek, Daimler Ag, Germany
    • Luisa Mich, University of Trento, Italy
    • Lloyd Montgomery, University of Hamburg, Germany
    • Nan Niu, University of Cincinnati, USA
    • Barbara Paech, Universität Heidelberg, Germany
    • Simon Andre Scherr, Fraunhofer, Germany
    • Michael Unterkalmsteiner, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
    • Andreas Vogelsang, University of Cologne, Germany
    • Liping Zhao, University of Manchester, UK
    • Han van der Aa, University of Mannheim, Germany