Naturalizing a programming language via interactive learning

Sida I. Wang, Samuel Ginn, Percy Liang, Christopher D. Manning

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

37 Scopus citations

Abstract

Our goal is to create a convenient natural language interface for performing well-specified but complex actions such as analyzing data, manipulating text, and querying databases. However, existing natural language interfaces for such tasks are quite primitive compared to the power one wields with a programming language. To bridge this gap, we start with a core programming language and allow users to "naturalize" the core language incrementally by defining alternative, more natural syntax and increasingly complex concepts in terms of compositions of simpler ones. In a voxel world, we show that a community of users can simultaneously teach a common system a diverse language and use it to build hundreds of complex voxel structures. Over the course of three days, these users went from using only the core language to using the naturalized language in 85.9% of the last 10K utterances.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationACL 2017 - 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages929-938
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781945626753
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017
Event55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2017 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Jul 30 2017Aug 4 2017

Publication series

NameACL 2017 - 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
Volume1

Other

Other55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2017
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver
Period7/30/178/4/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Linguistics and Language

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