A Language-Based Context-Sensitive Programming System for Novice Users

Abstract

This paper describes a programming system with which even novice users can easily specify their complex requests as natural language texts, in other words, write programs in everyday language, to operate computing systems. Based on a study of the characteristics 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. 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 its effectiveness and future work.