FSE 2026
Sun 5 - Thu 9 July 2026 Montreal, Canada
Wed 8 Jul 2026 10:50 - 11:10 at MB 2.430 - Requirement and Specification Chair(s): Neil Ernst

As Industry 4.0 transforms the food industry, the role of software in achieving compliance with food-safety regulations is becoming increasingly critical. Food-safety regulations, like those in many legal domains, have largely been articulated in a technology-independent manner to ensure their longevity and broad applicability. However, this approach leaves a gap between the regulations and the modern systems and software increasingly used to implement them. In this article, we pursue two main goals. First, we conduct a Grounded Theory study of food-safety regulations and develop a conceptual characterization of food-safety concepts that closely relate to systems and software requirements. Second, we examine the effectiveness of two families of large language models (LLMs) – BERT and GPT – in automatically classifying legal provisions based on requirements-related food-safety concepts. Our results show that: (a) when fine-tuned, the accuracy differences between the best-performing models in the BERT and GPT families are relatively small. Nevertheless, the most powerful model in our experiments, GPT-4o, still achieves the highest accuracy, with an average Precision of 89% and an average Recall of 87%; (b) few-shot learning with GPT-4o increases Recall to 97% but decreases Precision to 65%, suggesting a trade-off between fine-tuning and few-shot learning; (c) despite our training examples being drawn exclusively from Canadian regulations, LLM-based classification performs consistently well on test provisions from the US, indicating a degree of generalizability across regulatory jurisdictions; and (d) for our classification task, LLMs significantly outperform simpler baselines constructed using long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and automatic keyword extraction.

Wed 8 Jul

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

10:30 - 12:30
Requirement and SpecificationResearch Papers / Journal-First Paper at MB 2.430
Chair(s): Neil Ernst University of Victoria
10:30
20m
Talk
Automated Repair of Requirements for Cyber-Physical Systems in Simulink Requirements Tables
Research Papers
Aren Babikian University of Toronto, Alessio Di Sandro University of Toronto, Federico Formica McMaster University, Claudio Menghi University of Bergamo; McMaster University, Marsha Chechik University of Toronto
Pre-print
10:50
20m
Talk
An empirical study on LLM-based classification of requirements-related provisions in food-safety regulations
Journal-First Paper
Shabnam Hassani University of Ottawa, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh University of Ottawa, Daniel Amyot University of Ottawa
Pre-print
11:10
20m
Talk
Speculate: Generating REST API Specifications Using LLMs
Research Papers
Krishanu Singh IIT Delhi, Kushagra Karar IIT Delhi, Abhilash Jindal IIT Delhi, India, Guowei Yang University of Queensland
11:30
20m
Talk
Requirements Coverage-Guided Minimization for Natural Language Test Cases
Journal-First Paper
RONGQI PAN University of Ottawa, Feifei Niu Graz University of Technology, Lionel Briand University of Ottawa, Canada; Lero centre, University of Limerick, Ireland, Hanyang Hu Company A
11:50
20m
Talk
SpecWeaver: End-to-End HTTP API Specification Inference Across Multi-Layer Routing in Production Web Services
Research Papers
Wenbo Hu Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jie Lu SKLP, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jingting Chen Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Feng Li Key Laboratory of Network Assessment Technology, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China; School of CyberSpace Security at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Chenghang Shi SKLP, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, Xiaonan Shi Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences and School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jinchen Wang Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences and School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wei Huo Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences
12:10
20m
Talk
CASCADE: Detecting Inconsistencies between Code and Documentation with Automatic Test Generation
Research Papers
Tobias Kiecker Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Jan Arne Sparka Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Martin Reuter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Albert Ziegler XBow, Lars Grunske Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Pre-print