Hugo Liu & Henry Lieberman (2004). Toward a programmatic semantics of natural language. Proceedings of VL/HCC’04: 20th IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, 281–282, IEEE.
Liu, H., & Lieberman, H. (2004). Toward a programmatic semantics of natural language. In Proceedings of VL/HCC’04: 20th IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (pp. 281–282). IEEE.
@inproceedings{liu2004toward,
author = {Hugo Liu and Henry Lieberman},
title = {Toward a programmatic semantics of natural language},
booktitle = {Proceedings of VL/HCC’04: 20th IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing},
pages = {281--282},
publisher = {IEEE},
doi = {10.1109/vlhcc.2004.59},
url = {https://starheartsong.com/papers/pdf/VLHCC2004-ProgrammaticSemantics.pdf},
year = {2004}
}This two-page position paper catalogs recurrent correspondences between ordinary English and program structure. Nouns can suggest types and objects; possessives act like namespace paths; descriptive phrases select sets; “when” and “if” establish conditions; plurals invite iteration; ordered narration implies steps; and incomplete descriptions can preserve useful delayed commitment. Examples come from children's explanations of Pacman and early Metafor work. The important claim is modest: natural language carries programmatic structure that interfaces can exploit, even when it does not specify a whole program. The paper presents no new corpus, parser-coverage score, user study, or runnable-code evaluation. Many mappings still require common sense, contextual disambiguation, and structural inference, so the taxonomy is a research agenda rather than proof that arbitrary prose compiles.