Visualizing Schemes and Logics among Sentences in Paragraph

Abstract

Authors have been developing algorithms to extract sentences including logical relation of “implication” from specification documents, and have generated executable test program for validating software modules with model checking techniques for years, so as to decrease manufacturing costs in times of system testing. The sentences including the relation “implication” are the key for test case design, because these are regarded as statements of reasonings in the system specifications. The reasoning requires premises, constraints and design rationales, to reinforce reasoning process. The premises, constraints and design rationales are utilized to define test parameters and their range of value in the context of test case design. The sentences corresponding to premises, constraints and design rationales are very likely to be deployed in the same paragraph, where the sentence involving “implication” is included.We tried to visualize logical relations among sentences in a paragraph by focusing the key sentence including the relation “implication (→)” to help test engineers grasp logical scheme of the paragraph at a glance with natural language processing technique. The algorithms and tools for formalizing sentences in natural language and visualizing logical relations among them were developed in the study and applied to visualizing logical scheme for 747 summaries in the technical papers for the validation.