Papers › Explainable Natural Language to Bash Translation using Abstract Syntax Tree

Explainable Natural Language to Bash Translation using Abstract Syntax Tree

1 Nov 2021CoNLL (EMNLP) 2021 11archive 2025-07-28

Shikhar Bharadwaj, Shirish Shevade

Natural language processing for program synthesis has been widely researched. In this work, we focus on generating Bash commands from natural language invocations with explanations. We propose a novel transformer based solution by utilizing Bash Abstract Syntax Trees and manual pages. Our method incorporates tree structure information in the transformer architecture and provides explanations for its predictions via alignment matrices between user invocation and manual page text. Our method performs on par with the state of the art performance on Natural Language Context to Command task and performs better than fine-tuned T5 and Seq2Seq models.

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