NL2Bash: A Corpus and Semantic Parser for Natural Language Interface to the Linux Operating System

Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

Abstract

We present new data and semantic parsing methods for the problem of mapping English sentences to Bash commands (NL2Bash). Our long-term goal is to enable any user to perform otherwise repetitive computer operations (such as file manipulation, search, and application-specific scripting) by simply stating their goals in English. We take a first step in this domain, by providing a large new dataset of challenging but commonly used Bash commands and expert-written English descriptions, along with the baseline methods to establish performance levels on this task.