Automatic derivation of formal software specifications from informal descriptions

Miriyala, K.; Harandi, Mehdi T.

doi:10.1109/32.99198

Cited by 57 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The Natural Language Processing approach is one of the main novelties of this tool in the field of formalization of informal requirements: it differentiates from a patternmatching approach, where pre-defined structures are selected to represent the structure of input sentences (see, for example, [21], where this approach is used for an automatic derivation of Abstract Data Types from informal specifications). In such an approach the possible alternative is between recognized patterns and unknown patterns.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assisting requirement formalization by means of natural language translation

Fantechi¹,

Gnesi

Ristori

et al. 1994

Form Method Syst Des

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Abstract. A prototype assistant, NL2ACTL, is presented for the formalization ofbehavioural requirements for the design of reactive systems. NL2ACTL is a tool for the automatic translation of Natural Language sentences, into formulae of the action-based temporal logic ACTL. The Natural Language sentences are used to express informal requirements of reactive systems. ACTL is suitable for expressing properties of reactive systems, specified by means of process algebra terms. NL2ACTL was realized using a general development environment for Natural Language Processing and it has been interfaced with a verification environment which allows behavioural and logical properties of reactive systems to be checked.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assisting requirement formalization by means of natural language translation

Fantechi¹,

Gnesi

Ristori

et al. 1994

Form Method Syst Des

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“…[24] sketch a system that, among other capabilities, is able to build formal descriptions through natural-language dialogues. [25] describe a system to derive formal descriptions from natural-language specifications. [26] contains a description of a knowledgebased system that maintains a database of a software development project.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Method for Controlling the Production of Specifications in Natural Language

Macías¹,

Pulman²

1995

The Computer Journal

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Before a system can be formally defined, it is common to write a specification in a natural language as the basis for the formal definition. Natural languages are not well suited for this task; documentation written in a natural language is often ambiguous and imprecise. Inspection of real documentation also reveals that, without special training, most writers do not produce concise, clear or consistent statements. We present here an experimental interface to a general-purpose natural-language processing system designed to control the writing of specification statements in a natural language. The interface is designed to reduce the degree of imprecision and ambiguity in the natural-language statements, as well as contributing to the writing of shorter statements, with clear structure and punctuation. We compare our approach to similar work in this area. I N T R O D U C T I O NIt is generally accepted that the initial phase in the production of software must be a careful description of the system to be developed [1]. Any such specification should ideally be carried out in a formal language, but it is almost always the case that a previous specification in a natural language must be written. This is because formalspecification languages are often intelligible only to a small group of people, and formal specifications must thus be translated into a language that both client and developers can understand [2]. Several techniques have been advanced to assist non-specialists in the understanding of formal specifications, but natural-language specifications will continue to be used for the foreseeable future.The use of natural language in this context is not without problems. It is well known that natural languages lack the properties we associate with those languages used for formal specification tasks, namely well-defined syntax and semantics. In order to use natural languages for specification purposes, we must therefore carefully consider how to do it, in order to reduce the risk of producing deficient specifications. It has been noted in the literature that the requirements specification phase, particularly the production of natural-language specifications, is one of the weakest links in the process of formally developing a system (e.g. [3][4][5]).We describe in this paper a system consisting of a window-based interface to a natural-language processing system designed to write specifications in a controlled manner. Our primary goal is to provide a tool that can be used for this purpose in any setting. We assume that the typical users will be those with enough technical knowledge of the system to be specified, but not necessarily conversant with formal specification methods. Before we describe in more detail our system, we review the most salient characteristics found in some specification documents, and the problems they present. 1The fundamental problem of natural-language processing is the great amount of ambiguity at every linguistic level: morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. As expected, all these...

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“…SPECIFIER (Miriyala K. and Harandi M. 1991) detects analogies by m a t c hing structural descriptions of user speci cations against pre-existing concepts on the basis of xed primitive relations determining pairs of analogous elements in them. Successful matches are utilized for retrieving and instantiating operational schemas, indexed by these concepts in order to complete and formalize user speci cations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reuse has been realized as a form of analogical problem solving in the sense that knowledge about existing systems embedded in speci cations is transferred to speci cations of new systems after identifying analogies between them (Miriyala K. and Harandi M. 1991, Maiden N. and Sutcli e A. 1994).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analogical reuse of requirements specifications: A computational model

Spanoudakis¹

1996

Applied Artificial Intelligence

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Speci cations of requirements for new software systems can be revised, re ned or completed in reference to speci cations of requirements for existing similar systems. Although realized as a form of analogical problem solving, speci cation by reuse is not adequately supported by a vailable computational models for detecting analogies. This is chie y due to the following reasons: (1) It is assumed that speci cations are expressed according to the same speci cation model and in a uniform representation scheme. (2) Additional information is needed for the detection of analogies, which is not contained in the speci cations. (3) Performance scales poorly with the complexity of speci cations. This paper presents a computational model for detecting analogies, which addresses these issues to a certain extent. The application of the model in the speci cation of requirements by analogical reuse is demonstrated through an example, and its sensitivity to the representation of speci cations is discussed. Finally, the results of a preliminary empirical evaluation of the model are reported.

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Automatic derivation of formal software specifications from informal descriptions

Cited by 57 publications

References 17 publications

Assisting requirement formalization by means of natural language translation

Assisting requirement formalization by means of natural language translation

A Method for Controlling the Production of Specifications in Natural Language

Analogical reuse of requirements specifications: A computational model

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