Towards an Agentic LLM-based Approach to Requirement Formalization from Unstructured Specifications
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Early-stage specifications of safety-critical systems are typically expressed in natural language, making it difficult to derive formal properties suitable for verification and needed to guarantee safety. While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches can generate formal artifacts from text, they mainly focus on syntactic correctness and do not ensure semantic alignment between informal requirements and formally verifiable properties. We propose an agentic methodology that automatically extracts verification-ready properties from unstructured specifications. The modular pipeline combines requirement extraction, compatibility filtering with respect to a target formalism, and translation into formal properties. Experimental results across three scenarios show that the pipeline generates syntactically and semantically aligned formal properties with a 77.8% accuracy. By explicitly accounting for modeling and verification constraints, the approach is a paving step towards exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bridge the gap between informal descriptions and semantically meaningful formal verification.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institution: Politecnico di Milano
Subfield: Computational Theory and Mathematics
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7155086826
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