Programming in Natural Language with fuSE: Synthesizing Methods from Spoken Utterances Using Deep Natural Language Understanding
Sebastian Weigelt, Vanessa Steurer, Tobias Hey, Walter F. Tichy
Abstract
The key to effortless end-user programming is natural language. We examine how to teach intelligent systems new functions, expressed in natural language. As a first step, we collected 3168 samples of teaching efforts in plain English. Then we built fuSE, a novel system that translates English function descriptions into code. Our approach is three-tiered and each task is evaluated separately. We first classify whether an intent to teach new functionality is present in the utterance (accuracy: 97.7% using BERT). Then we analyze the linguistic structure and construct a semantic model (accuracy: 97.6% using a BiLSTM). Finally, we synthesize the signature of the method, map the intermediate steps (instructions in the method body) to API calls and inject control structures (F1: 67.0% with information retrieval and knowledge-based methods). In an end-to-end evaluation on an unseen dataset fuSE synthesized 84.6% of the method signatures and 79.2% of the API calls correctly.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.395
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4280–4295
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.395
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.395
- Cite (ACL):
- Sebastian Weigelt, Vanessa Steurer, Tobias Hey, and Walter F. Tichy. 2020. Programming in Natural Language with fuSE: Synthesizing Methods from Spoken Utterances Using Deep Natural Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4280–4295, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Programming in Natural Language with fuSE: Synthesizing Methods from Spoken Utterances Using Deep Natural Language Understanding (Weigelt et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/2020.acl-main.395.pdf