DeepOCL: A deep neural network for Object Constraint Language generation from unrestricted nature language

Abstract

Object Constraint Language (OCL) is one kind of lightweight formal specification, which is widely used for software verification and validation in NASA and Object Management Group projects. Although OCL provides a simple expressive syntax, it is hard for the developers to write correctly due to lacking knowledge of the mathematical foundations of the first‐order logic, which is approximately half accurate at the first stage of development. A deep neural network named DeepOCL is proposed, which takes the unrestricted natural language as inputs and automatically outputs the best‐scored OCL candidates without requiring a domain conceptual model that is compulsively required in existing rule‐based generation approaches. To demonstrate the validity of our proposed approach, ablation experiments were conducted on a new sentence‐aligned dataset named OCLPairs. The experiments show that the proposed DeepOCL can achieve state of the art for OCL statement generation, scored 74.30 on BLEU, and greatly outperformed experienced developers by 35.19%. The proposed approach is the first deep learning approach to generate the OCL expression from the natural language. It can be further developed as a CASE tool for the software industry.