03🔬 Research
TRAC-RE — Automated Requirements Engineering Framework
A Traceable, Reliable, Auditable, and Contextual framework for automated Requirements Engineering — structured parsing, context-aware classification, and implicit keyword discovery.
The research framework behind my MSc thesis at Ontario Tech University. **TRAC-RE** — Traceable, Reliable, Auditable, and Contextual — converts raw stakeholder prose into audit-grade knowledge artifacts across four interconnected phases:
1. **Phase 1 — Context-aware requirement identification** — Sentence-level classification with structured local-context features. F1 improved 0.664 → 0.894 on 110 FinTech/SaaS documents; 4K domain-aligned samples (F1=0.894) beat 15K mixed (F1=0.883). Supporting paper under review at RE'26 Main.
2. **Phase 2 — Audit-grade keyword extraction** — Perfect-precision extraction that surfaced a structural coverage ceiling of 1.5 canonical keywords per artifact, motivating the implicit-discovery phase. Supporting paper in revision at RE'26 RE@Next!.
3. **Phase 3 — Governed LLM parsing (HLJ)** — Multi-model parsing (GPT-4.1, Claude Opus 4, Meta-70B) into confidence-scored High-Level JSON with versioned tag governance (v0 → v2); tag precision 0.657 → 0.897. Supporting paper published at CASCON 2025.
4. **Phase 4 — Implicit keyword discovery** — A 5-stage engine over a 275,164-edge enriched co-occurrence graph, with UMAP+HDBSCAN cluster-gap detection and a bounded LLM-as-judge tiebreaker. Supporting paper in revision at RE'26 RE@Next!.
**Cross-cutting infrastructure** — 1,997 HLJ artifacts, a 13,725-entry domain dictionary, a FAISS index over 768-dim SBERT vectors, full per-decision audit logging, and drift monitoring across pipeline runs. The framework's central argument: governance and distributional alignment, not raw model scale, are the primary levers for trustworthy RE automation.