ACM Survey Draft on Formalising Software Requirements with Large Language Models

This draft is a working document, having a summary of nighty-four (94) papers with additional sections on Traceability of Software Requirements (Section 4), Formal Methods and Its Tools (Section 5), Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP) and Theory of Institutions (Section 6). Please refer to abstract of [7,8]. Key difference of this draft from our recently anticipated ones with similar titles, i.e. AACS 2025 [7] and SAIV 2025 [8] is: [7] is a two page submission to ADAPT Annual Conference, Ireland. Submitted on 18th of March, 2025, it went through the light-weight blind review and accepted for poster presentation. Conference was held on 15th of May, 2025. [8] is a nine page paper with additional nine pages of references and summary tables, submitted to Symposium on AI Verification (SAIV 2025) on 24th of April, 2025. It went through rigorous review process. The uploaded version on arXiv.org [8] is the improved one of the submission, after addressing the specific suggestions to improve the paper.

Formalising Software Requirements using Large Language Models

This paper is a brief introduction to our recently initiated project named VERIFAI: Traceability and verification of natural language requirements. The project addresses the challenges in the traceability and verification of formal specifications through providing support for the automatic generation of the formal specifications and the traceability of the requirements from the initial software design stage through the systems implementation and verification. Approaches explored in this project include Natural Language Processing, use of ontologies to describe the software system domain, reuse of existing software artefacts from similar systems (i.e. through similarity based reuse) and large language models to identify and declare the specifications as well as use of artificial intelligence to guide the process.