Feasibility Studies for Programming in Natural Language

We think it is time to take another look at an old dream -that one could program a computer by speaking to it in natural language. Programming in natural language might seem impossible, because it would appear to require complete natural language understanding and dealing with the vagueness of human descriptions of programs. But we think that several developments might now make programming in natural language feasible. First, improved broad coverage natural language parsers and semantic extraction techniques permit partial understanding. Second, mixed-initiative dialogues can be used for meaning disambiguation. And finally, where direct understanding techniques fail, we hope to fall back on Programming by Example, and other techniques for specifying the program in a more fail-soft manner. To assess the feasibility of this project, as a first step, we are studying how non-programming users describe programs in unconstrained natural language. We are exploring how to design dialogs that help the user make precise their intentions for the program, while constraining them as little as possible.