Reut Tsarfaty: 'Natural Language Programming (NLPRO): Turning Texts into Executable Code'

Abstract: Can we program computers in our native tongue? This idea, termed natural language programming (NLPRO), has attracted attention almost since the inception of computers themselves.

From the point of view of software engineering (SE), efforts to program in natural language (NL) have relied thus far on controlled natural languages (CNL) -- small unambiguous fragments of English with restricted grammars and limited expressivity. Is it possible to replace these CNLs with truly natural, human language? From the point of view of natural language processing (NLP), current technology successfully extracts information from NL texts. However, the level of NL understanding required for programming in NL goes far beyond such information extraction. Is it possible to endow computers with a dynamic kind of NL understanding? In this talk I argue that the solutions to these seemingly separate challenges are actually closely intertwined, and that one community's challenge is the other community's stepping stone for a huge leap and vice versa.

Specifically, in this talk I propose to view executable programs in SE as semantic structures in NLP, as the basis for broad-coverage semantic parsing. I present a feasibility study on the semantic parsing of requirements documents into executable scenarios, where the requirements are written in a restricted yet highly ambiguous fragment of English, and the target representation employs live sequence charts (LSC), a multi-modal executable programming language. The parsing architecture I propose jointly models sentence-level and discourse-level processing in a generative probabilistic framework. I empirically show that the discourse-based model consistently outperforms the sentence-based model, constructing a system that reflects both the static (entities, properties) and dynamic (behavioral scenarios) requirements in the input document.