Henry Lieberman & Hugo Liu (2006). Feasibility studies for programming in natural language. End-User Development (Eds. Lieberman, Paternò, Wulf), HCI Series Vol. 9, 459–474, Springer.
Lieberman, H., & Liu, H. (2006). Feasibility studies for programming in natural language. In Lieberman, Paternò, Wulf (Eds.), End-User Development (HCI Series Vol. 9, pp. 459–474). Springer.
@incollection{lieberman2006feasibility,
author = {Henry Lieberman and Hugo Liu},
title = {Feasibility studies for programming in natural language},
booktitle = {End-User Development},
editor = {Lieberman and Paternò and Wulf},
series = {HCI Series Vol. 9},
pages = {459--474},
publisher = {Springer},
doi = {10.1007/1-4020-5386-x_20},
url = {https://starheartsong.com/papers/pdf/EUD2006-FeasibilityNLP.pdf},
year = {2006}
}This chapter asks whether a non-programmer can communicate intent without first translating it into formal syntax. Its proposed answer combines broad but partial parsing, mixed-initiative dialogue, and programming by demonstration. The paper closely reads children's plain-English descriptions of Pacman and identifies the real interaction problems a system must survive: top-down and detail-first styles, assumed context, out-of-order instructions, advice rather than actions, missing cases, conflicts, and unannounced changes of viewpoint. A future system would maintain goals and a semantic code model, confirm interpretations, ask about unknown actions, and connect language to direct manipulation. This is a feasibility study and design proposal, not an implemented end-to-end product or quantitative trial. The authors explicitly concede that the imagined dialogue may exceed available language understanding.