{"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/text2app-a-framework-for-creating-android","title":"Text2App: A Framework for Creating Android Apps from Text Descriptions","arxiv_id":"2104.08301","date":"2021-04-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Masum Hasan","Kazi Sajeed Mehrab","Wasi Uddin Ahmad","Rifat Shahriyar"],"abstract":"We present Text2App -- a framework that allows users to create functional Android applications from natural language specifications. The conventional method of source code generation tries to generate source code directly, which is impractical for creating complex software. We overcome this limitation by transforming natural language into an abstract intermediate formal language representing an application with a substantially smaller number of tokens. The intermediate formal representation is then compiled into target source codes. This abstraction of programming details allows seq2seq networks to learn complex application structures with less overhead. In order to train sequence models, we introduce a data synthesis method grounded in a human survey. We demonstrate that Text2App generalizes well to unseen combination of app components and it is capable of handling noisy natural language instructions. We explore the possibility of creating applications from highly abstract instructions by coupling our system with GPT-3 -- a large pretrained language model. We perform an extensive human evaluation and identify the capabilities and limitations of our system. The source code, a ready-to-run demo notebook, and a demo video are publicly available at \\url{https://github.com/text2app/Text2App}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08301v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.08301v2.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":"text2app-a-framework-for-creating-android","repo_url":"https://github.com/text2app/Text2App","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"text2app-a-framework-for-creating-android","repo_url":"https://github.com/Masum06/Text2App","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"code-generation","task_name":"Code Generation"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"cosine-annealing","method_name":"Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt-3","method_name":"GPT-3"},{"method_slug":"lstm","method_name":"LSTM"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-cosine-annealing","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"seq2seq","method_name":"Seq2Seq"},{"method_slug":"sigmoid-activation","method_name":"Sigmoid Activation"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"tanh-activation","method_name":"Tanh Activation"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}