MOOIDE : natural language interface for programming MOO environments

Abstract

MOOIDE is an interface to allow novice users to program a MOO environment using natural language. Programming the MOO involves a variety of tasks like creating objects and their states, assigning verb actions to objects, and programming behavior that changes states of objects and generates messages. Once the MOO is programmed, other users can interact with the objects for entertainment or educational purpose. To make MOO programming easier and more accessible to novice programmers, our natural language interface allows users to describe different MOO programming tasks in English. These include adding objects, object properties, states and relationships between objects. They also include verbs through which behaviors are accessed in the MOO. Users can use English to describe decision statements, loops, conditions and other typical programming constructs. Earlier systems focused on addressing parsing issues in programming. However, those systems lacked commonsense knowledge. MOOIDE brings commonsense features to natural language programming in addition to parsing. Commonsense reasoning allows MOOIDE to automatically include typical object properties, verb affordances and affordance rules as well as typical verb effects. Such augmentation of natural language programming with commonsense reasoning capabilities can help make programming significantly more intuitive to novice programmers.