Theoretical foundations of natural language programming and publishing for intelligent agents and robots

This paper is an application of ontology theory, conceptual graphs and programming language theories to develop the theoretical foundations of natural language programming (NLP) that has in recent years been used to produce natural language documents for intelligent agents and human readers. The analysis given reveals three benefits of NLP. First, it is “conceptualized” programming that enables developers to write less bug prone programs due to clarity of code presentation and enforced structuring of data. Secondly, NLP can aid programming of the all important abstractions for robots: event, action and world model abstractions can be created by sentences. Thirdly, NLP can be used to publish natural language documents by researchers, i.e. English language documents on control theory and procedures, on the Internet or in printed documents. This theoretical paper also defines a large class of intelligent agents that can read such documents. This enables human users and agents to have shared understanding of how application systems work.