Turbocharging Textsearch with NLP
Searching through a piece of text doesn’t sound like a task one would need a lot of fancy NLP technology for, but we recently had a case where this was actually necessary:
One of our customers asked us if we could help them with searching for specific terms in their documents. Their task was to deal with contracts and requirements, where missing even a small detail can potentially cost millions down the line. Additionally, these documents are usually very long, sometimes several thousands of pages. So if one where to simply Ctrl + F for a specific term one might get hundreds and hundreds of results, most of which irrelevant.
OTTERs and the Theory of Automatic Testgeneration
Creating test cases by hand can be a lot of effort. It takes time, and so costs plenty of money. It is estimated that testing on average costs roughly 50% of the project budget.So maybe, we could try and skip it? Well, we still need to test and, among other things, make sure that the system behaves in the way we specified. But maybe we can develop an automatic method for creating tests? And this is the core idea: Why not use the specification to generate the tests?
Detecting Cause-Effect Relations in Natural Language
Anyone who has used a recent version of Specmate might has already seen an amazing new feature. In the overview screen of any Cause-Effect-Graph is now an anoccurus little button titled “Generate Model”. Clicking this button will trigger a chain of systems, that is capable of using natural language processing to turn a sentence like
If the user has no login, and login is needed, or an error is detected, a warning window is shown and a signal is emitted.directly into a CEG, without any additional work from the user:
In this article we will do a deep dive into this feature, have a look at the natural language processing (NLP) pipeline required to make such a system work, see different approaches to implement it, and figure out how to garner the power of natural language processing for our goals.