LEGOS-SLEEC: Tool for Formalizing and Analyzing Normative Requirements

TL;DR

LEGOS-SLEEC is a tool that helps interdisciplinary stakeholders formalize, analyze, and debug normative requirements for systems interacting with humans, ensuring compliance with social, legal, and ethical standards.

Contribution

The paper introduces LEGOS-SLEEC, a tool that enhances the formalization and analysis of normative requirements using SLEEC rules, with improved usability and diagnostic support based on extensive case studies.

Findings

Effective support for interdisciplinary stakeholders in specifying normative requirements.

Significant UI and diagnostic improvements validated across multiple case studies.

Demonstrated effectiveness through four stakeholder evaluations.

Abstract

Systems interacting with humans, such as assistive robots or chatbots, are increasingly integrated into our society. To prevent these systems from causing social, legal, ethical, empathetic, or cultural (SLEEC) harms, normative requirements specify the permissible range of their behaviors. These requirements encompass both functional and non-functional aspects and are defined with respect to time. Typically, these requirements are specified by stakeholders from a broad range of fields, such as lawyers, ethicists, or philosophers, who may lack technical expertise. Because such stakeholders often have different goals, responsibilities, and objectives, ensuring that these requirements are well-formed is crucial. SLEEC DSL, a domain-specific language resembling natural language, has been developed to formalize these requirements as SLEEC rules. In this paper, we present LEGOS-SLEEC, a tool designed to support interdisciplinary stakeholders in specifying normative requirements as SLEEC rules, and in analyzing and debugging their well-formedness. LEGOS-SLEEC is built using four previously published components, which have been shown to be effective and usable across nine case studies. Reflecting on this experience, we have significantly improved the user interface of LEGOS-SLEEC and its diagnostic support, and demonstrate the effectiveness of these improvements using four interdisciplinary stakeholders. Showcase video URL is: https://youtu.be/LLaBLGxSi8A