Toward Natural Language Computation

A computer programming system called the "Natural Language Computer" (NLC) is described which allows a user to type English commands while watching them executed on sample data appearing on a display screen. Direct visual feedback enables the user to detect most misinterpretation errors as they are made so that incorrect or ambiguous commands can be retyped or clarified immediately. A sequence of correctly executed commands may be given a name and used as a subroutine, thus extending the set of available operations and allowing larger English-language programs to be constructed hierarchically. In addition to discussing the transition network syntax and procedural semantics of the system, special attention is devoted to the following topics: the nature of imperative sentences in the matrix domain; the processing of non-trivial noun phrases; conjunction; pronominals; and programming constructs such as "if", "repeat", and procedure definition.