Analogical Reasoning for Natural to Formal Language Transfer

In this paper, we explore the use of proportional analogy reasoning to address the problem of language transfer, that is the production of an utterance in a defined target language, given another in the source language. The application we focused on is the transfer of requests in a natural language (French) into commands in a formal language (bash). We introduce a hybrid approach which parallelly uses formal analogy in the language domain and in the more general word sequences domain in order to separately tackle linguistic and parametric variations. On the observation that parametric variations are the most unpredictable, we also apply analogy to automatically extend the available data by generating new requests from the existing ones. Our approach is language independent, it was designed with the help of analogical reasoning to be as generic as possible.