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

arXiv cs.CL / 3/31/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses the challenge of translating natural language instructions into Signal Temporal Logic (STL), where structural ambiguity often makes one-to-one translation unreliable for non-expert users.
  • It proposes an ambiguity-preserving pipeline that retains multiple plausible syntactic analyses rather than committing to a single interpretation during parsing.
  • The three-stage method uses Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) for ambiguity-preserving n-best parsing, STL-oriented template-based semantic composition, and canonicalization with score aggregation.
  • Instead of outputting a single STL formula, the system returns a deduplicated set of STL candidate formulas with plausibility scores to explicitly represent multiple formal interpretations.
  • Case studies show the approach produces multiple candidates for genuinely ambiguous inputs while collapsing unambiguous or equivalent derivations into a single canonical STL formula.

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.