Formalization of natural language requirements into temporal logics: a survey

One of the challenges of requirements engineering is the fact that requirements are often formulated in natural language. This represents difficulty if requirements must be processed by formal approaches, especially if these approaches are intended to check the requirements. In model checking, a formal technique of verification by exhaustive state space exploration, requirements must be stated in formal languages (most commonly, temporal logics) which are essentially supersets of the Boolean propositional logic. Translation of natural language requirements to these languages is a process which requires much knowledge and expertise in model checking as well the ability to correctly understand these requirements, and hence automating this process is desirable. This paper reviews existing approaches of requirements formalization that are applicable for, or at least can be adapted to generation of discrete time temporal logic requirements. Based on the review, conclusions are made regarding the practical applicability of these approaches for the considered problem.