Bachelor Project in Software Technology

Project number 9984

Natural Language Interface to Command Line File Operations

Description

The idea of the project is to develop a program which can aid the user in construction of complex file operations in a language the command line interpreter can execute, by letting the user express the operations in a language the user is familiar with (e.g. English). The operations that the program should be able to construct will be limited to relatively trivial and unambiguous operations on files.

The project will cover the following:

• A domain for operations on files needs to be defined in a logic (predicate logic, or possibly an extension hereof) accompanied by a knowledge base with the basic knowledge of the domain.
• A program needs to be developed which is able to understand a fragment of the English language relevant for file operation and translate this into the above-mentioned logic.
• For each command line utility that the end program shall to be able to use in the construction of commands, the function of the utility needs to be defined in the above-mentioned logic.
• A heuristic search algorithm needs to be developed that can combine the statements of each command line utility in order to get a statement that is equivalent to the statement which is derived from the user's English sentence.

Supervisors

Jørgen Villadsen

Students (Spring 2008)

Anders Pedersen

2008-06-03