Automated conversion from requirements documentation to an object-oriented formal specification language

Abstract

In software engineering there have been very few attempts to automate the translation from a requirements document written in a natural language (NL) to one of the formal specification languages. One of the major reasons for this challenge comes from the ambiguity of the NL requirements documentation because NL depends heavily on context. We use Contextual Natural Language Processing (CNLP) to overcome the ambiguity in NL, and Two-Level Grammar (TLG) to construct a bridge between a NL requirements specification and a formal specification in VDM++, an object-oriented extension of the Vienna Development Method. The result is a system for mapping natural language requirements documents into an object-oriented formal specification language.