Natural Language User Interface For Software Engineering Tasks

In this paper, we present the idea to use natural language as the user interface for programming tasks. Programming languages assist with repetitive tasks that involve the use of conditionals, loops and statements. This is what is often challenging users. However, users can easily describe tasks in their natural language. We aim to develop a Natural Language User Interface that enables users to describe algorithms, including statements, loops, and conditionals. For this, we extend our current spreadsheet system to support control flows. An evaluation shows that users solved more than 60% of tasks. Although far from perfect, this research might lead to fundamental changes in computer use. With natural language, programming would become available to everyone. We believe that it is a reasonable approach for end user software engineering and will therefore overcome the present bottleneck of IT proficients. Keywords–Natural Language Processing; End User Development; Natural Language Interfaces; Human Computer Interaction; Programming In Natural Language; Dialog Systems.