A library to support user input for custom domain-specific languages

Abstract

Domain-specific languages are languages tailored to solve problems in a specific domain, commonly used to aid in day-to-day tasks, such as data retrieval and report generation. However, such languages often lack naturalness, which may discourage their use. Therefore, this project partially addresses this issue by focusing on the use of controlled natural languages, which are generally designed to have a more natural syntax. The design process of controlled natural languages typically consists of a feedback loop, whereby grammar developers design and adjust the grammars of such languages depending on the feedback received from end-users. The issue with such a process is that it involves an intermediary stage which depends on a programmer to design/update an input system based on the designed/updated grammar, in order to provide an interface to end-users with which to test the language. This may cause the language’s prototyping process to be both costly and time consuming. This project proposes a solution that automates the intermediary stage with the purpose of accelerating the prototyping process of controlled natural languages. The solution involves the creation of a library which supports user input based on controlled natural languages. The library serves as a framework, which given any type of context-free grammar describing such languages as input, automates the generation of a user interface. The generated user interface provides an intuitive way for end-users to structurally compose sentences using the interface’s underlying grammar through a series of drop-down lists. Such lists provide a set of suggestions based on the inputted grammar and the current sentence’s progress, whereby end-users are not necessarily required to be extensively knowledgeable of the grammar’s syntax. The evaluation phase of this project concluded that the library does in fact manage to handle all types of context-free grammars correctly. Furthermore, a user acceptance test was carried out to evaluate whether the library allows a user interface to be generated in an intuitive manner. The feedback obtained from this test confirmed that the users found the process to be rather straightforward. Finally, another user acceptance test was performed to evaluate the generated user interface’s ease-of-use. The results concluded that the user interface satisfies the majority of a set of predefined usability criteria. Thus, the evaluation phase indicates that the library enables rapid prototyping of controlled natural languages. Moreover, the generated interface allows non-technical users to easily compose sentences using the interface’s underlying language.