Mobile robot programming using natural language

How will naive users program domestic robots? This paper describes the design of a practical system that uses natural language to teach a vision-based robot how to navigate in a miniature town. To enable unconstrained speech the robot is provided with a set of primitive procedures derived from a corpus of route instructions. When the user refers to a route that is not known to the robot, the system will learn it by combining primitives as instructed by the user. This paper describes the components of the Instruction-Based Learning architecture and discusses issues of knowledge representation, the selection of primitives and the conversion of natural language into robot-understandable procedures.     

An experimental study of natural language programming

An experiment is described which gives data related to the usefulness and efficiency of English as a programming language. The experiment was performed with the NLC system, described herein, and used twenty-three paid volunteers from a first course in programming. Subjects were asked to solve two problems, namely (1) solution of linear equations and (2) gradebook averaging. A total of 1581 English sentences were typed, 81% of which were processed correctly. The remaining 19% were rejected because of questionable user syntax or system inadequacies. In most cases, subjects were able to paraphrase a rejected input in terminology understandable by the system. The overall success rate at solving an entire problem, within the 2½ h time constraint of the experiment, was 73·9%. In short, the system was an effective problem solver for the selected classes of problems and users. Many system failures resulted from “bugs” or syntactic oversights which appear amenable to easy repair. None of the Standard concerns about natural language programming related to vagueness, ambiguity, verbosity or correctness was a significant problem, although minor difficulties did arise occasionally.     

A Prolog-based natural language front-end system

A Prolog-based natural language front-end system is described with the following major issues of discussion: Domain independence of the syntax analyser was achieved by the ‘generate-and-test’ notion and the domain independent semantic representation; Determiners were treated as higher order predicates; A technique called ‘syntactic feature’ was employed to write a readable parser in Prolog.     

Systems Programming in the Functional Language FP

The development of systems software in functional programming language is still an open problem.This paper describes a preliminary experiment with systems programming in Backus' FP systems.Itconsists of two systems programs.One is a self-compiler of FP,the other an interpreter of the semantics ofFFP(Formal Functional Programming).Both were implemented on an FP machine——FPM2.Somediscussions are made finally.     

2DT-FP: A parallel functional programming language on two-dimensional data

We propose a new paradigm for programming multiprocessor systems, 2DT (two-dimensional transformations). 2DT programs are composed of local computations on linear data (columns) and global transformations on 2-dimensional combinations of columns (2D-arrays). Local computations can be expressed in a functional or imperative base language; a typed variant of Backus' FP is chosen for 2DT-FP. The level of abstraction of 2DT makes it suitable for programming a relevant set of algorithms, in general any algorithms, whose data can be easily mapped to 2-dimensional representations. A set of examples tries to prove this claim. An interleaving semantics for 2DT-FP is given, exposing the potential for parallel execution of 2DT-FP programs. The claim is proved that any sequential and thus any parallel execution will deliver the same result. The implementation realized on the Intel Hypercube is described. Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG     

The manipulator language with the characteristic of a functional programming language

This article describes the motion-oriented robot language IML (interactive manipulator language) with the characteristic of a functional programming language. The main functions of IML are (1) It is possible to describe the iterative motions without using a loop. (2) The user-defined procedures (commands) can be called by specifying the command name. (3) It is possible to describe robot motion (a sequence of the position and orientation of a robot hand) and force magnitude in the task-oriented Cartesian coordinate system (task coordinate system) suitable for robot tasks. Furthermore, it is possible to describe the translation and rotation of the coordinate system without syntactic distinction. (4) As the teaching data can be easily embedded in the language and can be played back in the force control mode, complex task programming becomes easy. In IML, as the user-defined command and the teaching data can be used just as the builtin system command; the system can be extended easily and naturally. In this article these features are described, and it is shown that these functions can be realized with the unified representation by introducing the concept of a functional programming language. The effectiveness of IML was confirmed by actually making a robot perform some tasks programmed in IML.     

Customizing a functional programming language for web development

The characteristics of functional programming languages recommend them for web development. We checked that in practice, by customizing the functional programming language Wafl for web development. Customizations include support for web document types, web data access functions, textual templates, web dialogs and extension of transactional mechanisms to web session data. Prototype implementations of Wafl are developed. Our experience shows that application of Wafl in the web development domain is fully justified and that web development may benefit from functional programming languages in both education and production.     

Goedel语言类型系统

Goedel语言是一种说明性逻辑程序设计语言。该语言基于一阶逻辑，引入了一个多态多类的类型系统和多种新的语言成分，支持抽象数据类型和模块化程序设计等技术，语言本身也具有很强的说明性语义。详细介绍了Goedel语言的类型系统及其构造，对在逻辑程序设计语言中引入类型系统的作用进行了一些深入的分析和讨论。     

利用结对编程技术改进程序设计实践教学

介绍了结对编程的概念,阐述了其作为学习编程技能的一种过程改进策略在国外计算机专业教学中的实验效果,并论述了相关影响因素。     

A natural language discourse model to explain linear programming models and solutions

This paper presents a natural language (i.e., English) discourse model to explain a linear programming model and, possibly, its computed solution (which need not be optimal). Drawing from earlier syntactic translations, a semantic model is presented, based on economic input-output relations commonly found in large-scale linear programs. These are then shown how to form rule-driven explanations, which comprises a fundamental component of an intelligent mathematical programming system.     

A parallel parsing system for natural language analysis

The paper presents a parallel parsing system for Definite Clause Grammars suitable for committed-choice parallel logic programming languages. Grammatical elements such as words and nonterminal symbols are defined as parallel processes. Parsing is done by the processcommunication. The advantage of the system is that all the grammar rules are compiled into the parallel logic programming language and the program has neither any side-effect nor duplicated computation.     

A parallel language and its programming system for heterogeneous networks

The paper presents a new parallel language, mpC, designed specially for programming high‐performance computations on heterogeneous networks of computers, as well as its supportive programming environment. The main idea underlying mpC is that an mpC application explicitly defines an abstract network and distributes data, computations and communications over the network. The mpC programming environment uses, at run time, this information as well as information on any real executing network in order to map the application to the real network in such a way that ensures the efficient execution of the application on this real network. Experience of using mpC for solving both regular and irregular real‐life problems on networks of heterogeneous computers is also presented. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A portable storage management system for the icon programming language

Icon is a new programming language designed primarily for non-numerical applications. Its roots are in SNOBOL4 and SL5; as in those languages, execution-time flexibility is an important attribute of Icon, although some aspects of programs are bound at compile time to improve efficiency. Icon, which is implemented in Ratfor, is also intended to be portable and suitable for 16-bit computers. The storage management system in Icon is designed to meet the goals of portability, flexibility and efficiency. This is accomplished by subdividing the storage management system into a set of type-specific storage management subsystems. This paper describes the implementation of these subsystems, their interaction, and their performance.     

Some Mathematical Properties of the Functional Programming Language FP

This paper will introduce the function systems approach to study the mathematicalproperties of Backus functional programming language FP.Here,a function system isdefined as a set of functions o FP.In the paper,we define the notions of complete,orthogonaland orthonormal systems,and prove their principal properties.These properties are used in thediscussion of the completeness of FP program algebra and properties of the expansion ofprogram in orthogonal systems.     

函数式语言方法在网络交互程序中的应用

网络应用程序中为了保持程序的交互性,服务器端的控制程序如CGI(command gateway interface)程序需要在不同的脚本程序之问切换,这样不可避免的会造成控制信息的丢失.为了避免这些问题,介绍了将函数式程序设计语言的一些方法,如Continuation、CPS(eontinuationpassing style)等,并将它们应用到网络程序设计中,不仅简化了设计过程,也提高了程序的安全性,并可以在更一般的语言中实现.