Property Specification Language and Mining Specifications
Guide: Prof. Supratik Chakraborty
Abstract: Formal methods increase a system's reliability to a very large extent. It has still not found wide spread acceptance due to its complex and hard-to-implement nature. The necessity of charting thorough and correct specifications of systems is one major deterrent in adopting formal methods. In this report we study two ideas that attempt to reduce this complexity involved in coding system specifications. Property Specification Language (PSL) is a language used in formal methods to specify logic designs. PSL adds syntactic sugar and regular expressions to logic representation systems to make them more intuitive and easy to use. The second part of the report covers the novel concept of ``mining'' specifications from large software applications. A machine learning based approach to discover formal specifications in the interaction of software systems with certain APIs is studied.
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