This is an introduction to Vaklipi, a system that lets you write programs and give instructions to a computer using English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, French, Chinese, etc.
The Java command System.out.println(3×4+2) returns the answer 14. The same thing in Vaklipi would be What is 3 into 4 plus 2?
In German, it would be Was ist 3 mal 4 addiert zu 2?
Imagine a day when spoken language sentences can be recognized perfectly by a machine.
It suddenly becomes much easier and more natural to issue commands and pose queries in a natural language, rather than, say in XML. Imagine speaking a C program to someone, syntax and all. That would be really weird!
We recently evaluated spoken language programming by combining a speech recognizer with Vaklipi, our fifth generation programming language.
The results were frankly disappointing.
Here’s a sample conversation between me and my computer:
Cohan : b is equal to two.
Sphinx hears: b is e equal to two.
Vaklipi [error]: I can’t understand …
Cohan : b equals two.
Sphinx: b equals two.
Cohan : What is b.
Sphinx: What is 8.
Vaklipi : 8.0
Cohan : What is b.
Sphinx: What is b.
Vaklipi: 2.0
Thanks to everyone who filled out the long and tedious questionnaire to help us evaluate the algorithms used in Vaklipi for a research paper.
The paper we submitted to IJCNLP in 2011 titled Natural Language Programming Using Class Sequential Rules was accepted to the conference, and so we traveled to Chiang Mai in Thailand in November 2011 to make an oral presentation of the paper to our peers.
It contains ‘Fibonacci Number Generator’ programs in Hindi, Kannada and Tamil.
There are millions of students who study mainly in these languages, and they might some day be able to learn programming using systems such as VakLipi.
Thanks to all the people filled out the surveys we sent out and helped evaluate Vaklipi. We also thank the people who helped us port the system to other languages like: Kannada (Ms. K. G. Padma Lekha, Mr. K. G. Srikanta Dani, Dr. K. R. Ganesha, and Mr. Rupesh Kumar G.), Tamil (Mrs. Linda Christy and Dr. S. Carlos), Hindi (Mr. Kartik Asooja of Aiaioo Labs and Mr. Chandra Bhan Asooja), French (M. Sammy Ben Rabah, M. Yann Jouanique et Mme. Fanny Jouanique), German (Hartmut Wege, Judith Klein und Deepica Rao), Chinese (under development – Dright Ho), Japanese (Jojo Baby), Polish (under development – Joanna Lupinska – Asia), Telugu (under development – Mrs. Meenakshi Jami).