Toward a Programmatic Semantics of Natural Language

Authors:
Hugo Liu;Henry Lieberman
Affiliations:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology;Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Venue:
VLHCC '04 Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages - Human Centric Computing
Year:
2004

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Abstract

Natural language is imbued with a rich semantics but unfortunately its complex elegance is often mistaken for mere imprecision. Because complete parsers of English are not yet achievable, people assume that it is not feasible to use English directly as a means of instructing computers. However, in this paper, we show that English descriptions of procedures often contain programmatic semantics - linguistic features that can be easilymapped into programming language constructs. Some linguistic features can even inspire new ways of thinking about specifying programs. Far from being hopelessly ambiguous, natural languages exhibit important principles of communication that could be used to make human-computer communication more natural.