Enhancing Transformation from Natural Language to Signal Temporal Logic Using LLMs with Diverse External Knowledge

Yue Fang, Zhi Jin, Jie An, Hongshen Chen, Xiaohong Chen, Naijun Zhan


Abstract
Temporal Logic (TL), especially Signal Temporal Logic (STL), enables precise formal specification, making it widely used in cyber-physical systems such as autonomous driving and robotics. Automatically transforming NL into STL is an attractive approach to overcome the limitations of manual transformation, which is time-consuming and error-prone. However, due to the lack of datasets, automatic transformation currently faces significant challenges and has not been fully explored. In this paper, we propose a NL-STL dataset named STL-Diversity-Enhanced (STL-DivEn), comprising 16,000 samples enriched with diverse patterns. To develop the dataset, we first manually create a small-scale seed set of NL-STL pairs. Next, representative examples are identified through clustering and used to guide large language models (LLMs) in generating additional NL-STL pairs. Finally, diversity and accuracy are ensured through rigorous rule-based filters and human validation. Furthermore, we introduce the Knowledge-Guided STL Transformation (KGST) framework, a novel approach for transforming natural language into STL, involving a generate-then-refine process based on external knowledge. Statistical analysis shows that the STL-DivEn dataset exhibits more diversity than the existing NL-STL dataset. Moreover, both metric-based and human evaluations indicate that our KGST approach outperforms baseline models in transformation accuracy on STL-DivEn and DeepSTL datasets.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.544
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
10446–10458
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.544/
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Cite (ACL):
Yue Fang, Zhi Jin, Jie An, Hongshen Chen, Xiaohong Chen, and Naijun Zhan. 2025. Enhancing Transformation from Natural Language to Signal Temporal Logic Using LLMs with Diverse External Knowledge. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 10446–10458, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Transformation from Natural Language to Signal Temporal Logic Using LLMs with Diverse External Knowledge (Fang et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.544.pdf