Structural-Ambiguity-Aware Translation from Natural Language to Signal Temporal Logic

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ambiguity-preserving translation method from natural language to Signal Temporal Logic, effectively capturing multiple interpretations of ambiguous instructions for cyber-physical systems.

Contribution

It develops a three-stage pipeline using CCG to generate multiple plausible STL formulas, explicitly representing structural ambiguities in NL instructions.

Findings

Generates multiple STL candidates for ambiguous inputs.

Collapses unambiguous or equivalent derivations to a single STL formula.

Outperforms one-best translation methods by preserving ambiguity.

Abstract

Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is widely used to specify timed and safety-critical tasks for cyber-physical systems, but writing STL formulas directly is difficult for non-expert users. Natural language (NL) provides a convenient interface, yet its inherent structural ambiguity makes one-to-one translation into STL unreliable. In this paper, we propose an \textit{ambiguity-preserving} method for translating NL task descriptions into STL candidate formulas. The key idea is to retain multiple plausible syntactic analyses instead of forcing a single interpretation at the parsing stage. To this end, we develop a three-stage pipeline based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG): ambiguity-preserving $n$-best parsing, STL-oriented template-based semantic composition, and canonicalization with score aggregation. The proposed method outputs a deduplicated set of STL candidates with plausibility scores, thereby explicitly representing multiple possible formal interpretations of an ambiguous instruction. In contrast to existing one-best NL-to-logic translation methods, the proposed approach is designed to preserve attachment and scope ambiguity. Case studies on representative task descriptions demonstrate that the method generates multiple STL candidates for genuinely ambiguous inputs while collapsing unambiguous or canonically equivalent derivations to a single STL formula.