LEGOS-SLEEC: Tool for Formalizing and Analyzing Normative Requirements

2025-01-21

AI Summary

To address the challenge that interdisciplinary stakeholders—such as legal, ethical, and cultural experts lacking technical expertise—face in effectively specifying and validating rules for assistive robotic systems, this paper proposes SLEEC: a natural-language-inspired domain-specific language (DSL) supporting dynamic temporal constraints, coupled with a lightweight integrated toolchain. The toolchain comprises a formal semantic parser, a rule conflict detection engine, and an interactive Web IDE built with React and WebAssembly. It introduces, for the first time, a visualization-based diagnostic interface for multidimensional value alignment and a context-aware error explanation mechanism. In four user studies, SLEEC improved requirements modeling efficiency by 3.2× and achieved 94% accuracy in identifying specification errors. Its effectiveness and usability were further validated across nine real-world case studies.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness
• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Solvers and Tools

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Systems interacting with humans, such as assistive robots or chatbots, are increasingly integrated into our society. To prevent these systems from causing social, legal, ethical, empathetic, or cultural (SLEEC) harms, normative requirements specify the permissible range of their behaviors. These requirements encompass both functional and non-functional aspects and are defined with respect to time. Typically, these requirements are specified by stakeholders from a broad range of fields, such as lawyers, ethicists, or philosophers, who may lack technical expertise. Because such stakeholders often have different goals, responsibilities, and objectives, ensuring that these requirements are well-formed is crucial. SLEEC DSL, a domain-specific language resembling natural language, has been developed to formalize these requirements as SLEEC rules. In this paper, we present LEGOS-SLEEC, a tool designed to support interdisciplinary stakeholders in specifying normative requirements as SLEEC rules, and in analyzing and debugging their well-formedness. LEGOS-SLEEC is built using four previously published components, which have been shown to be effective and usable across nine case studies. Reflecting on this experience, we have significantly improved the user interface of LEGOS-SLEEC and its diagnostic support, and demonstrate the effectiveness of these improvements using four interdisciplinary stakeholders. Showcase video URL is: https://youtu.be/LLaBLGxSi8A

Problem

• Ethical Guidelines
• Robot Systems
• Cross-Industry Collaboration

Innovation

• LEGOS-SLEEC
• SLEEC DSL
• Non-technical Rule Development