Evaluating Assurance Cases as Text-Attributed Graphs for Structure and Provenance Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Ikhwantri, Fariz, Marijan, Dusica
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866910179228909568
author Ikhwantri, Fariz
Marijan, Dusica
author_facet Ikhwantri, Fariz
Marijan, Dusica
contents An assurance case is a structured argument document that justifies claims about a system's requirements or properties, which are supported by evidence. In regulated domains, these are crucial for meeting compliance and safety requirements to industry standards. We propose a graph diagnostic framework for analysing the structure and provenance of assurance cases. We focus on two main tasks: (1) link prediction, to learn and identify connections between argument elements, and (2) graph classification, to differentiate between assurance cases created by a state-of-the-art large language model and those created by humans, aiming to detect bias. We compiled a publicly available dataset of assurance cases, represented as graphs with nodes and edges, supporting both link prediction and provenance analysis. Experiments show that graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve strong link prediction performance (ROC-AUC 0.760) on real assurance cases and generalise well across domains and semi-supervised settings. For provenance detection, GNNs effectively distinguish human-authored from LLM-generated cases (F1 0.94). We observed that LLM-generated assurance cases have different hierarchical linking patterns compared to human-authored cases. Furthermore, existing GNN explanation methods show only moderate faithfulness, revealing a gap between predicted reasoning and the true argument structure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_20577
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Assurance Cases as Text-Attributed Graphs for Structure and Provenance Analysis
Ikhwantri, Fariz
Marijan, Dusica
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
An assurance case is a structured argument document that justifies claims about a system's requirements or properties, which are supported by evidence. In regulated domains, these are crucial for meeting compliance and safety requirements to industry standards. We propose a graph diagnostic framework for analysing the structure and provenance of assurance cases. We focus on two main tasks: (1) link prediction, to learn and identify connections between argument elements, and (2) graph classification, to differentiate between assurance cases created by a state-of-the-art large language model and those created by humans, aiming to detect bias. We compiled a publicly available dataset of assurance cases, represented as graphs with nodes and edges, supporting both link prediction and provenance analysis. Experiments show that graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve strong link prediction performance (ROC-AUC 0.760) on real assurance cases and generalise well across domains and semi-supervised settings. For provenance detection, GNNs effectively distinguish human-authored from LLM-generated cases (F1 0.94). We observed that LLM-generated assurance cases have different hierarchical linking patterns compared to human-authored cases. Furthermore, existing GNN explanation methods show only moderate faithfulness, revealing a gap between predicted reasoning and the true argument structure.
title Evaluating Assurance Cases as Text-Attributed Graphs for Structure and Provenance Analysis
topic Software Engineering
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20577