Hugo Liu & Henry Lieberman (2005). Metafor: visualizing stories as code. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2005), 305–307, ACM Press.
Liu, H., & Lieberman, H. (2005). Metafor: visualizing stories as code. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2005) (pp. 305–307). ACM Press.
@inproceedings{liu2005metafor,
author = {Hugo Liu and Henry Lieberman},
title = {Metafor: visualizing stories as code},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2005)},
pages = {305--307},
publisher = {ACM Press},
url = {https://starheartsong.com/papers/pdf/IUI2005-Metafor.pdf},
year = {2005}
}Metafor treats a story as an early program model. MontyLingua parses typed English into subject-verb-object structures; ConceptNet helps constrain plausible readings; semantic recognizers update a code model; and a Python renderer continuously shows the emerging scaffolding. Nouns can become objects or classes, verbs functions, adjectives properties, and “when” clauses conditions. Later sentences may refactor earlier interpretations as context accumulates. Thirteen beginner and intermediate programmers estimated the effort required to build Pacman, brainstormed with Metafor, and revised their estimates. Beginners reported a 22 percent reduction and intermediates 11 percent, with greater willingness to use the system than paper. These are confidence judgments, not completed programming tasks; the examiner sometimes rephrased input, coverage was partial, and generated code might not run.