Resolving syntactic ambiguities in natural language specification of constraints

Abstract

In the NL2OCL project, we aim to translate English specification of software constraints to formal constraints such as OCL (Object Constraint Language). In the used approach, the Stanford POS tagger and the Stanford Parser are employed for syntactic analysis of English specification and the output of syntactic analysis is given to our semantic analyzer for the detailed semantic analysis. However, in few cases, the Stanford POS tagger and parser are not able to handle particular syntactic ambiguities in English specifications of software constraints. In this paper, we highlight the identified cases of syntactic ambiguities and we also present a novel technique to automatically resolve the identified syntactic ambiguities. By addressing the identified cases of syntactic ambiguities, we can generate more accurate and complete formal (OCL) specifications. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.