At present, bots are still in their preliminary stages of development. Many are relatively simple, or developed ad-hoc for a very specific use-case. For this reason, they are typically programmed manually, or utilize machine-learning classifiers to interpret a fixed set of user utterances. In reality, real world conversations with humans require support for dynamically capturing users expressions. Moreover, bots will derive immeasurable value by programming them to invoke APIs for their results. Today, within the Web and Mobile development community, complex applications are being stringed together with a few lines of code -- all made possible by APIs. Yet, developers today are not as empowered to program bots in much the same way. To overcome this, we introduce BotBase, a bot programming platform that dynamically synthesizes natural language user expressions into API invocations. Our solution is two faceted: Firstly, we construct an API knowledge graph to encode and evolve APIs; secondly, leveraging the above we apply techniques in NLP, ML and Entity Recognition to perform the required synthesis from natural language user expressions into API calls.
Interacting with computers is a ubiquitous activity for millions of people. Repetitive or specialized tasks often require creation of small, often one-off, programs. End-users struggle with learning and using the myriad of domain-specific languages (DSLs) to effectively accomplish these tasks. We present a general framework for constructing program synthesizers that take natural language (NL) inputs and produce expressions in a target DSL. The framework takes as input a DSL definition and training data consisting of NL DSL pairs. From these it constructs a synthesizer by learning optimal weights and classifiers (using NLP features) that rank the outputs of a keyword-programming based translation. We applied our framework to three domains: repetitive text editing, an intelligent tutoring system, and flight information queries. On 1200+ English descriptions, the respective synthesizers rank the desired program as the top-1 and top-3 for 80 and 90 descriptions respectively. Millions of computer end users need to perform tasks over tabular spreadsheet data, yet lack the programming knowledge to do such tasks automatically. This paper describes the design and implementation of a robust natural language based interface to spreadsheet programming. Our methodology involves designing a typed domain-specific language (DSL) that supports an expressive algebra of map, filter, reduce, join, and formatting capabilities at a level of abstraction appropriate for non-expert users. The key algorithmic component of our methodology is a translation algorithm for converting a natural language specification in the context of a given spreadsheet to a ranked set of likely programs in the DSL. The translation algorithm leverages the spreadsheet spatial and temporal context to assign interpretations to specifications with implicit references, and is thus robust to a variety of ways in which end users can express the same task. The translation algorithm builds over ideas from keyword programming and semantic parsing to achieve both high precision and high recall. We implemented the system as an Excel add-in called NLyze that supports a rich user interaction model including annotating the user's natural language specification and explaining the synthesized DSL programs by paraphrasing them into structured English. We collected a total of 3570 English descriptions for 40 spreadsheet tasks and our system was able to generate the intended interpretation as the top candidate for 94 (97 for the top 3) of those instances.