# Synthline: A Product Line Approach for Synthetic Requirements Engineering Data Generation using Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03265 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03265/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15056/) (2023)
- [Instruction Tuning with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03277/) (2023)
- [True Few-Shot Learning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11447/) (2021)
- [On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15126/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model as Attributed Training Data Generator: A Tale of Diversity and Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15895/) (2023)
- [ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07922/) (2022)
- [Few-shot Fine-tuning vs. In-context Learning: A Fair Comparison and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16938/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Potential and Limitations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07849/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Prompting: Generating Chain-of-Thought Demonstrations for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00618/) (2023)
- [Lessons from the Use of Natural Language Inference (NLI) in Requirements Engineering Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05135/) (2024)
- [Which AI Technique Is Better to Classify Requirements? An Experiment with SVM, LSTM, and ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11547/) (2023)
- [Replication in Requirements Engineering: the NLP for RE Case](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10265/) (2023)
- [Data Augmentation for Conflict and Duplicate Detection in Software Engineering Sentence Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09608/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Multi-Sample Prompting and Actor-Critic Prompt Optimization for Diverse Synthetic Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21138/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While modern Requirements Engineering (RE) heavily relies on natural language processing and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, their effectiveness is limited by the scarcity of high-quality datasets. This paper introduces Synthline, a Product Line (PL) approach that leverages Large Language Models to systematically generate synthetic RE data for classification-based use cases. Through an empirical evaluation conducted in the context of using ML for the identification of requirements specification defects, we investigated both the diversity of the generated data and its utility for training downstream models. Our analysis reveals that while synthetic datasets exhibit less diversity than real data, they are good enough to serve as viable training resources. Moreover, our evaluation shows that combining synthetic and real data leads to substantial performance improvements. Specifically, hybrid approaches achieve up to 85% improvement in precision and a 2x increase in recall compared to models trained exclusively on real data. These findings demonstrate the potential of PL-based synthetic data generation to address data scarcity in RE. We make both our implementation and generated datasets publicly available to support reproducibility and advancement in the field.