Skip to main content

Towards More Efficient Requirements Formalization: A Study

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2015)

Abstract

[Context and motivation] Validating natural language requirements is an important but difficult task. Although there are techniques available for validating formalized requirements, the gap between natural language requirements and formalism is huge. [Question/ problem] As part of a larger piece of work on temporal requirements consistency checking, we developed a front end to semi-automatically translate natural language requirements into an formal language called Temporal Action Language or \( TeAL \). This work is based on an underlying assumption that human analysts can assist us in filling in the missing pieces as we translate natural language temporal requirements to \( TeAL \).[Principal ideas/results] We performed a study to validate this assumption. We found that using the statements generated by our front-end tool appears to be more effective and efficient than a manual process. [Contribution] We present the design of our front-end and a study that measures the performance of human analysts in formalizing requirements with the help of an automated tool.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. CM-1 Dataset PROMISE Website. http://promisedata.org/promised/trunk/promisedata.org/data/cm1-maintain/cm1-maintain.txt, (accessed: April 18, 2013)

  2. Regional real-time transit information system system requirements version 3.0 (2012). http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/tcip/Real-Time_TransitSystemRequirements_v3.0.pdf, (accessed: April 18, 2013)

  3. Baldridge, J.: The opennlp project. http://opennlp.apache.org/index.html (accessed February 2, 2012) (2005)

  4. Baral, C., Gelfond, M.: Reasoning agents in dynamic domains. In: Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence, pp. 257–279. Springer (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Cimatti, A., Giunchiglia, E., Pistore, M., Roveri, M., Sebastiani, R., Tacchella, A.: Integrating BDD-based and SAT-based symbolic model checking. In: Armando, A. (ed.) FroCos 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2309, pp. 49–56. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Cleland-Huang, J., Settimi, R., Zou, X., Solc, P.: The detection and classification of non-functional requirements with application to early aspects. In: 14th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering, pp. 39–48. IEEE (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  7. De Marneffe, M.C., MacCartney, B., Manning, C.D., et al.: Generating typed dependency parses from phrase structure parses. Proceedings of LREC 6, 449–454 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Deeptimahanti, D.K., Babar, M.A.: An automated tool for generating uml models from natural language requirements. In: 24th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2009, pp. 680–682. IEEE (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Dwyer, M.B., Avrunin, G.S., Corbett, J.C.: Patterns in property specifications for finite-state verification. In: Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 411–420. IEEE (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Fliedl, G., Kop, C., Mayr, H.C., Winkler, C., Weber, G., Salbrechter, A.: Semantic tagging and chunk-parsing in dynamic modeling. In: Meziane, F., Métais, E. (eds.) NLDB 2004. LNCS, vol. 3136, pp. 421–426. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Gildea, D., Jurafsky, D.: Automatic labeling of semantic roles. Computational Linguistics 28(3), 245–288 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Holzmann, G.J.: The model checker spin. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 23(5), 279–295 (1997)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  13. Huth, M., Ryan, M.: Logic in Computer Science: Modelling and reasoning about systems. Cambridge University Press (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Klein, D., Manning, C.D.: Accurate unlexicalized parsing. In: Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 1. pp. 423–430. Association for Computational Linguistics (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Konrad, S., Cheng, B.H.: Facilitating the construction of specification pattern-based properties. In: Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering, pp. 329–338. IEEE (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Konrad, S., Cheng, B.H.: Real-time specification patterns. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering. pp. 372–381. ACM (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Larsen, K.G., Pettersson, P., Yi, W.: Uppaal in a nutshell. International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT) 1(1), 134–152 (1997)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  18. Levy, R., Andrew, G.: Tregex and tsurgeon: Tools for querying and manipulating tree data structures. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources And Evaluation. pp. 2231–2234. Citeseer (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Li, W., Brown, D., Hayes, J.H., Truszczynski, M.: Answer-set programming in requirements engineering. In: Salinesi, C., van de Weerd, I. (eds.) REFSQ 2014. LNCS, vol. 8396, pp. 168–183. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Li, W., Hayes, J.H., Truszczyński, M.: Temporal Action Language (TAL): A controlled language for consistency checking of natural language temporal requirements. In: Goodloe, A.E., Person, S. (eds.) NFM 2012. LNCS, vol. 7226, pp. 162–167. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Marcus, M.P., Marcinkiewicz, M.A., Santorini, B.: Building a large annotated corpus of english: The penn treebank. Computational Linguistics 19(2), 313–330 (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Marek, V.W., Truszczyński, M.: Stable models and an alternative logic programming paradigm. In: The Logic Programming Paradigm, pp. 375–398. Springer (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Mondragon, O.A., Gates, A.Q.: Supporting elicitation and specification of software properties through patterns and composite propositions. International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering 14(01), 21–41 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Niemelä, I.: Logic programs with stable model semantics as a constraint programming paradigm. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 25(3–4), 241–273 (1999)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  25. Nikora, A.P., Balcom, G.: Automated identification of ltl patterns in natural language requirements. In: 20th International Symposium onSoftware Reliability Engineering, ISSRE 2009, pp. 185–194. IEEE (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Smith, R.L., Avrunin, G.S., Clarke, L.A., Osterweil, L.J.: Propel: An approach supporting property elucidation. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 11–21. ACM (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Snover, M., Dorr, B., Schwartz, R., Micciulla, L., Makhoul, J.: A study of translation edit rate with targeted human annotation. In: Proceedings of Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, pp. 223–231 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Spyns, P.: Natural language processing. Methods of Information in Medicine 35(4), 285–301 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Tichy, W.F., Padberg, F.: Empirical methods in software engineering research. In: 29th International Conference on Software Engineering-Companion, ICSE 2007 Companion, pp. 163–164. IEEE (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Weston, N., Chitchyan, R., Rashid, A.: A framework for constructing semantically composable feature models from natural language requirements. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Software Product Line Conference, pp. 211–220. Carnegie Mellon University (2009)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wenbin Li .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Li, W., Hayes, J.H., Truszczyński, M. (2015). Towards More Efficient Requirements Formalization: A Study. In: Fricker, S., Schneider, K. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9013. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16101-3_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16101-3_12

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16100-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16101-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics