Automating the translation of assertions using natural language processing techniques

In order to verify natural language assertions from a specification automatically, they need to be translated into formal representations. This process is error-prone and can lead to a product that does not meet the initial intentions.We automate this process by first partitioning all assertions into subsets based on sentence similarity and then providing a translation template for each subset which must be completed by the designer. Since many assertions are described by similar sentences, the number of manual translation steps can be decreased significantly. We evaluated our approach by translating English constraint sentences from an industrial specification into SystemVerilog assertions.