What the nature of natural language tells us about how to make natural-language-like programming languages more natural

What baboons can (not) tell us about natural language grammars.

Rey et al. (2012) present data from a study with baboons that they interpret in support of the idea that center-embedded structures in human language have their origin in low level memory mechanisms and associative learning. Critically, the authors claim that the baboons showed a behavioral preference that is consistent with center-embedded sequences over other types of sequences. We argue that...

NLP (Natural Language Processing) for NLP (Natural Language Programming)

Natural Language Processing holds great promise for making computer interfaces that are easier to use for people, since people will (hopefully) be able to talk to the computer in their own language, rather than learn a specialized language of computer commands. For programming, however, the necessity of a formal programming language for communicating with a computer has always been taken for gr...

Natural Language is a Programming Language: Applying Natural Language Processing to Software Development

A powerful, but limited, way to view software is as source code alone. Treating a program as a sequence of instructions enables it to be formalized and makes it amenable to mathematical techniques such as abstract interpretation and model checking. A program consists of much more than a sequence of instructions. Developers make use of test cases, documentation, variable names, program structure...

Programming Language Support for Natural Language Interaction

Modern conversational user interfaces depend on natural language understanding (NLU) engines, but integrating these capabilities creates a new category of engineering challenges. Developers write verbose, unsafe code to intermediate between NLU services and application logic, and ambiguous parses further complicate handling. We present a DSL for configuring an NLU model that ensures consistency...

Natural Language As A Special Case Of Programming Languages