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Programmatic semantics for natural language interfaces

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

An important way of making interfaces usable by non-expert users is to enable the use of natural language input, as in natural language query interfaces to databases, or MUDs and MOOs. When the subject matter is about procedures, however, we have discovered that interfaces can take advantage of what we call Programmatic Semantics, procedural relations that can be inferred from the linguistic structure. Roughly, nouns can be interpreted as data structures; verbs are functions; adjectives are properties. Some linguistic forms imply conditionals, loops, and recursive structures.We illustrate the principles of Programmatic Semantics with a description of Metafor, a "brainstorming" editor for programs, analogous to an outlining tool for prose writing. Metafor interactively converts English sentences to partially specified program code, to be used as "scaffolding" for a more detailed program. A user study showed that Metafor is capable of capturing enough Programmatic Semantics to facilitate non-programming users and beginners' conceptualization of programming problems.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '05: CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2005
1358 pages
ISBN:1595930027
DOI:10.1145/1056808
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 02 April 2005

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Author Tags

  1. brainstorming
  2. case tools
  3. natural language interfaces
  4. programmatic semantics
  5. storytelling

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  • (2024)A Novel Natural Language Processing Based Model for Plagiarism Detection2024 International Conference on Emerging Smart Computing and Informatics (ESCI)10.1109/ESCI59607.2024.10497386(1-5)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2024
  • (2023)“What It Wants Me To Say”: Bridging the Abstraction Gap Between End-User Programmers and Code-Generating Large Language ModelsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580817(1-31)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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  • (2017)Designing cyber-physical systems from natural language descriptions2017 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop (HLDVT)10.1109/HLDVT.2017.8167461(39-44)Online publication date: Oct-2017
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