Papers › NL2CMD: An Updated Workflow for Natural Language to Bash Commands Translation

NL2CMD: An Updated Workflow for Natural Language to Bash Commands Translation

15 Feb 2023arXiv:2302.07845archive 2025-07-28

Quchen Fu, Zhongwei Teng, Marco Georgaklis, Jules White, Douglas C. Schmidt

Translating natural language into Bash Commands is an emerging research field that has gained attention in recent years. Most efforts have focused on producing more accurate translation models. To the best of our knowledge, only two datasets are available, with one based on the other. Both datasets involve scraping through known data sources (through platforms like stack overflow, crowdsourcing, etc.) and hiring experts to validate and correct either the English text or Bash Commands. This paper provides two contributions to research on synthesizing Bash Commands from scratch. First, we describe a state-of-the-art translation model used to generate Bash Commands from the corresponding English text. Second, we introduce a new NL2CMD dataset that is automatically generated, involves minimal human intervention, and is over six times larger than prior datasets. Since the generation pipeline does not rely on existing Bash Commands, the distribution and types of commands can be custom adjusted. We evaluate the performance of ChatGPT on this task and discuss the potential of using it as a data generator. Our empirical results show how the scale and diversity of our dataset can offer unique opportunities for semantic parsing researchers.

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magnumresearchgroup/bash_gen officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report
magnumresearchgroup/magnum-nlc2cmd officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Code TranslationDiversitySemantic ParsingTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Code Translation NLC2CMD ChatGPT Accuracy 0.806 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

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