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Automated Mining and Checking of Formal Properties in Natural Language Requirements

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Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11776))

Abstract

Bridging the gap between natural language requirements (NLR) and precise formal specifications is a crucial task of knowledge engineering. Software system development has become more complex in recent years, and it includes many requirements in different domains that users need to understand. Many of these requirements are expressed in natural language, which may be incomplete and ambiguous. However, the formal language with its rigorous semantics may accurately represent certain temporal logic properties and allow for automatic validation analysis. It is difficult for software engineers to understand the formal temporal logic from numerous requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel method to automatically mine the linear temporal logic (LTL) from the natural language requirements and check the consistency among different formal properties. We use natural language processing (NLP) to parse requirement sentences and map syntactic dependencies to LTL formulas by using our extraction rules. Also, we apply the automata-based model checking to assess the correctness and consistency of the extracted properties. Through implementation and case studies, we demonstrate that our approach is well suited to deal with the temporal logic requirements upon which the natural language is based.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/index.jsp.

  2. 2.

    https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61602178), Shanghai Science and Technology Committee Rising-Star Program (No. 18QB1402000).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Trusted Embedded Software Engineering Technology Research Center, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Xingxing Pi, Jianqi Shi, Yanhong Huang & Hansheng Wei

  2. Hardware/Software Co-Design Technology and Application Engineering, Research Center, Shanghai, China

    Jianqi Shi

  3. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Computing, Shanghai, China

    Yanhong Huang

Authors
  1. Xingxing Pi
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  2. Jianqi Shi
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  3. Yanhong Huang
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  4. Hansheng Wei
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jianqi Shi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece

    Christos Douligeris

  2. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Dimitris Karagiannis

  3. University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece

    Dimitris Apostolou

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Pi, X., Shi, J., Huang, Y., Wei, H. (2019). Automated Mining and Checking of Formal Properties in Natural Language Requirements. In: Douligeris, C., Karagiannis, D., Apostolou, D. (eds) Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management. KSEM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11776. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29563-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29563-9_8

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29563-9

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