NL2Bash: A Corpus and Semantic Parser for Natural Language Interface to the Linux Operating System

Xi Victoria Lin, Chenglong Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Michael D. Ernst

Abstract: We present new data and semantic parsing methods for the problem of mapping English sentences to Bash commands (NL2Bash). Our long-term goal is to enable any user to perform otherwise repetitive computer operations (such as file manipulation, search, and application-specific scripting) by simply stating their goals in English. We take a first step in this domain, by providing a large new dataset of challenging but commonly used Bash commands and expert-written English descriptions, along with the baseline methods to establish performance levels on this task.