Automatically Locating Results to Support Systematic Reviews in Software Engineering

Background: Systematic Reviews are extremely dependent on human effort and, therefore, costly and time consuming. Some authors in Software En- gineering are starting to research the use of computer support to reduce human labor in some tasks of the process. Aim: Define a method for automatic location of sentences that describe the results in an unstructured scientific paper aiming to reduce the human effort. Method: Three sentence classification methods were analyzed and a new sentence classification method was proposed and tested with the same input set used in the other methods. Results: The method pro- posed in this work reached rates ranged between 60% and 72% of recall of the sentences describing results of the papers. Conclusions: The proximity between the recall rates found in automatic tests conducted with the proposed method and in a test with humans confirms the feasibility of this technique for automat- ing part of the process.