Understanding Of Japanese In An Interactive Programming System

KIPS is an automatic programming system which generates standardized business application programs through interactive natural language dialogue. KIPS models the program under discussion and the content of the user's statements as organizations of dynamic objects in the object*oriented programming sense. This paper describes the statement*model and the program-model, their use in understanding Japanese program specifications, and bow they are shaped by the linguistic singularities of Japanese input sentences. I I N T R O D U C T I O N KIPS, an interactive natural language programming system, that generates standardized business application programs through interactive natural language dialogue, is under development at Fujitsu (Sugiyama, 1984). Research on natural language programming systems ( 'NLPS ' ) (l-leidorn, 1976, McCune, 1979) has been pursued in America since the late 1960's and some results of prototype systems are emerging (Biermaun, 1983). But in Japan, although Japanese-like programming languages (Ueda, 1983) have recently a p p e a r e d , there is no natural language programming system. Generally, for a Net~PS to understand natural language specifications, modeling of both the program under discussion and of the content of the user's s tatement: is required. In conventional systems (Heidorn, 1970, McCune, 1979), programs and rules encoding linguistic knowledge first govern parsing procedures which extract from the user's input a statement*model; then "program model building rules" direct procedures which update or modify the program-model in light of what the user has stated. There are thus two separate models and two separate procedural components. However, we believe that knowledge about semantic parsing and program model building should be incorporated into the statement*model and the program-model, respectively. In the NLPS we are working on, these two models are organizations of objects (in the object-oriented programming sense (Bobrow, 1981)), each possessing local knowledge and procedures. The user's input is first parsed by a syntactic analysis procedure which communicates subtrees to the statement*model objects for semantic judgments and annotations, such that the completed parse tree is trivially transformable into the statement model. In the second stage, the statement model is sent to an object in the program model (#PROGRAM) which sends messages to other program-model objects corresponding to components of the user's statement; it is these objects which perform the updating and modification operations. This paper describes the statement*model and the programmodel, their use in understanding Japanese program specifications, and how they have been shaped by the linguistic singularities of the Japanese input sentences dealt with so far. Isuglyams's current address k Advanced Computer Systems Department, SRI InternatlonsJ, Menlo Park, CA 94028. II M O D E L S A.. P r o l [ r a m .Model To get a better understanding of the way users describe programs, we asked programmers to specify programs in a short paragraph, and sampled illustrative descriptions of simple programs from a Hyper COBOL user's manual (Fujitsu, 1981) (Hyper COBOL is the target programming language of KIPS). This resulted in a corpus of 60 program descriptions, comprising about 300 sentences. The program model we built to deal with this corpus is divided into a model of files and a model of processes (Figure I). . . . . . . . model o f p r o c e s s e s . . . . . . . . . . . . m o d e l o f files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~" . . . . . . . " r . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " r . . . . . . . b . . . . . ~ C I~ ,U