Paper:
Language: English:

A Proposal of a Language-Based Context-Sensitive Programming System

Toru Sugimoto^, Noriko Ito^, and Shino Iwashita^

^Faculty of Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, 3-7-5 Toyosu, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-8548, Japan
^Faculty of Culture and Information Science, Doshisha University, 1-3 Tatara Miyakodani, Kyotanabe, Kyoto 610-0394, Japan
^School of Computer Science, Tokyo University of Technology, 1404 Katakura, Hachioji, Tokyo 192-0982, Japan

Received: March 14, 2007

Accepted: July 10, 2007

Keywords: everyday language, context dependency, rhetorical structure, program generation

Journal ref: Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol.11, No.8 pp. 1015-1022, 2007

Abstract

This paper describes a programming system with which even novice users can easily specify complex requests as natural language texts, in other words, write programs in everyday language, to operate computing systems. Based on a study of task specification texts written by non-programmers, the processing model is designed so that implicit and ambiguous information in an input text is detected and transformed into an explicit executable program structure. Context dependency in programming is also considered. Context-dependent factors in the situation of program development and the situation of program execution are considered in text understanding and program execution phases, bridging the gap between these two contexts. We have developed a prototype system that deals with personal email management tasks. In this paper, we explain our processing model, give evaluation results, and discuss our proposal’s effectiveness and projected work.

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