Bridge between Human Tongue and Computer Language: Automated Conversion from a Requirements Document to an Executable Formal Specification

In software requirements engineering, there have been very few attempts to automate the translation of a requirements document from 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. To make a smooth transition from NL requirements to one of the formal-specification languages, a specification that can mediate these two domains of different formalism levels is required. We use Two-Level Grammar, the most NL-like specification language to construct a bridge between an NL requirements specification and a formal-specification. In addition, Contextual Natural Language Processing is employed to overcome the challenges of the ambiguity in NL. The systematic structure of Extensible Markup Language assists the automation by representing NL specifications with an improved organization, as well as explicit domain-specific knowledge. The result is a formal representation of the informal requirements in NL for prototyping and even for implementation, promoting rapid prototyping and reusability of requirements documents.