{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/explainable-natural-language-to-bash","title":"Explainable Natural Language to Bash Translation using Abstract Syntax Tree","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-11-01","proceeding":"CoNLL (EMNLP) 2021 11","authors":["Shikhar Bharadwaj","Shirish Shevade"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.conll-1.20","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.conll-1.20.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"explainable-natural-language-to-bash","repo_url":"https://github.com/shikhar-s/explainable-nl-to-bash-ast","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"program-synthesis","task_name":"Program Synthesis"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}