NLI-GSC: A Natural Language Interface for Generating SourceCode

Abstract

There are many different programming languages and each programming language has its own structure or way of writing the code, it becomes difficult to learn and frequently switch between different programming languages. Due to this reason, a person working with multiple programming languages needs to look at documentations frequently which costs time and effort. In the past few years, there have been significant increase in the amount of papers published on this topic, each providing a unique solution to this problem. Many of these papers are based on applying NLP concepts in unique configuration to get the desired results. Some have used AI along with NLP to train the system to generate source-code in specific language, and some have trained the AI directly without pre-processing the dataset with NLP. All of these papers face two problems: a lack of proper dataset for this particular application and each paper can convent natural language into only one specified programming language source-code. This proposed system shows that a language independent solution is a feasible alternate for writing source-code without having full knowledge about a programming language. The proposed system uses Natural Language Processing to convert Natural Language into programming language-independent pseudo code using custom Named Entity Recognition and save it in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format which is an intermediate step. Then, using traditional programming, this system converts the generated pseudo code into programming language-dependent source-code. In this paper, another novel method has been proposed to create dataset from scratch using predefined structure that is filled with predefined keywords creating unique combination of training dataset.

Bridging the Gap: Template-Based Coding for Transitioning from Visual Logic to Text-Based Programming

“…Changing the programming language is common for people working in the IT field, but it is daunting when they need such a shift due to courses' requirements or in the marketplace. Therefore, giving the learners the ability to work with syntax-independent constructs increases their confidence [22]. The syntax error warnings and compiler feedback both contribute significantly to the identification of the issues.…”

“…Recent studies have focused on the Natural Language Interface (NLI) as a visual/pseudocode to text transition. Ansari et al [22] created the NLI application to interpret pseudocode-like statements into Java code in an attempt to let students focus on the problem-solving issue. The proposed environment focuses on the syntactical side of the entered sentences in the hope of recognizing the meaning and translating it into a runnable code.…”

“…All the participants are from the college of business except one from IT, distributed as 53 Management Information Systems (MIS), 28 Business Administration (BA), and 27 Finance (FINA) students. The course under study is compulsory for the MIS, which means most of them are at the sophomore level (age [19][20][21][22][23]. However, the programming is an elective course for the BA and FINA majors.…”

“…However, the programming is an elective course for the BA and FINA majors. Most of the students in these two majors are juniors or seniors (age [21][22][23][24][25].…”