Using a meta-language to bridge the gap between natural languages and computer languages

Natural languages have vast vocabularies, complex grammars and inherent ambiguities that make them difficult to be processed directly by computers, even with state-of-the-art technology. Therefore, in order to communicate with computers we need to ‘develop software’, which is actually the very process of translating our problem statements, data and solution algorithms from the languages we speak to the languages that computers speak. But software development and maintenance are costly, time consuming and have many major challenges of their own. In this document we present a group of techniques and tools, collectively named as Temizer Description System, that aim to bridge the gap between natural languages and computer languages by enabling computers to understand the logical structure of natural language texts. The main idea is to tag texts piece by piece in order to make them semantically meaningful to the computers. Once computers start figuring out the meaning of text chunks, they can also use the same chunks to talk back to us and we demonstrate how this new and effective way of communication could be used to automate (i.e. eliminate) many tedious and error-prone aspects of developing and maintaining software.

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[1] More information about NL is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language

[2] Centre for Language Technology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. More information about the state of the research is available at http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~rolfs/controlled-naturallanguages/

[3] More information about the Attempto Project is available at http://attempto.ifi.unizh.ch/site/

[4] More information about PENG is available at http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~rolfs/peng/

[5] More information about CLCE is available at http://www.jfsowa.com/clce/specs.htm

[6]J More information about KANT is available at http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/Research/Kant/

[7] RTCA DO-178B, "Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification", December 1992, http://www.rtca.org/

[8] More information about Graphviz is available at http://www.graphviz.org/

[9] Temizer S., "Yazılım Yapılandırma Teknikleri: Temizer Sistemi", İkinci Ulusal Yazılım Mühendisliği Sempozyumu, UYMS'05, pp. 305-313, Ankara, September 22-24, 2005.