NLP & TUJA

April 16 2004

Homepage: http://www.shedai.net/~tuja e-mail: tuja@shedai.net

This seminar will cover the philosophical background of NLP(Natural Language Processing) which is built on cognitive sciences, linguistic and language philosophy as a branch of artificial intelligence. Current studies on NLP is also another subject; as an example TUJA(Turkish JAVA) will be the major subject in our seminar. You can find the short definition of TUJA below:

Programming languages are machine processible, precise and mostly unambiguous with predefined syntax and semantics. Still, a novice programmer spends a lot of effort in learning syntactic rules and at the same time developing general programming skills. Even an experienced programmer may face the very same problems, if the programming language is a new one. On the other hand, natural languages are more declarative, flexible, powerful and richer, being useful even for occasional users. Also, the programmer may not know the language used in the resources, such as books, to learn a new programming language.

There are visual tools for creating object oriented designs, furthermore, generating Java/C++ skeletal programs, such as Rational Rose (an IBM product). Turkish to Java (TUJA) is a natural language processing (NLP) application, designed with two modes of operation, where each mode is to be implemented as a phase. First phase involves in building an interface for creating a skeletal Java program, including all classes, their attributes (data) and prototypes of member methods of each class. Second phase involves in enlarging the functionality of the same interface to convert each skeletal class into full Java programs by allowing users to express them in Turkish sentences. TUJA accepts Turkish sentences, describing a class, a member method or a member attribute of a class, using a conversational front end. Then the input is fed into an augmented transition network (ATN) for parsing and semantic analysis. At the end of this process knowledge database is updated using the current command. Knowledge is represented using schemata. At any instant, the user can ask TUJA to produce the Java skeletal code, saving it into a file. Architecture of TUJA is illustrated in the below figure.

Framework of TUJA