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Towards a Natural Language Compiler

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Advances in Computational Intelligence (MICAI 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11289))

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Abstract

Being able to create a natural language compiler has been one of the most sought-after goals to reach since the very beginning of artificial intelligence. Since then; however, it has been an elusive and difficult task to achieve to the extent of being considered almost impossible to perform. In this article, we present a promising path by using a grammar formalism which attempts to model natural language; in principle, by using minimalist grammars as one of the last proposed instances of formalism of this type. The main idea consists in creating a parser based on this type of grammars which could recognize and analyze the text (or input program) written in natural language and use this parser as a front-end of a compiler. Then, for the rest of the compilation process, utilize the usual phases of a classic compiler of a programming language. Moreover, we present a prototype of a natural language compiler whose specific language is that of arithmetic expressions, in order to show with evidence that it is indeed possible to implement it, that is to say, to put the proposed compiler design into practice, showing in this manner that it is actually possible to create a natural language compiler following this promising path.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We believe that it makes sense to start with easy to process and well-defined natural language subsets and subsequently to cover more complex challenging ones.

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Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank Edward Stabler for allowing us to freely modify his MG top-down beam parser implementation, for getting acquainted with some of the most recent MG parsing advances and for encouraging us to develop a Spanish MG. This work was supported by the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), fund 2016-01-2225, and DGAPA, fund IN403016.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Ingeniería, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Angel Zúñiga, Gerardo Sierra & Gemma Bel-Enguix

  2. Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Sofía N. Galicia-Haro

Authors
  1. Angel Zúñiga
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  2. Gerardo Sierra
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  3. Gemma Bel-Enguix
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  4. Sofía N. Galicia-Haro
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Angel Zúñiga .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City, Mexico

    Ildar Batyrshin

  2. Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City, Mexico

    María de Lourdes Martínez-Villaseñor

  3. Faculty of Engineering, Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City, Mexico

    Hiram Eredín Ponce Espinosa

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Zúñiga, A., Sierra, G., Bel-Enguix, G., Galicia-Haro, S.N. (2018). Towards a Natural Language Compiler. In: Batyrshin, I., Martínez-Villaseñor, M., Ponce Espinosa, H. (eds) Advances in Computational Intelligence. MICAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11289. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04497-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04497-8_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04496-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04497-8

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