Vajra: step-by-step programming with natural language

Viktor Schlegel, Benedikt Lang, Siegfried Handschuh, André Freitas

Abstract:

Building natural language programming systems that are geared towards end-users requires the abstraction of formalisms inherently introduced by programming languages, capturing the intent of natural language inputs and mapping it to existing programming language constructs.

We present a novel end-user programming paradigm for Python, which maps natural language commands into Python code. The proposed semantic parsing model aims to reduce the barriers for producing well-formed code (syntactic gap) and for exploring third-party APIs (lexico-semantic gap). The proposed method was implemented in a supporting system and evaluated in a usability study involving programmers as well as non-programmers. The results show that both groups are able to produce code with or without prior programming experience.