Towards More Efficient Requirements Formalization: A Study

[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 our front-end tool is 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.