Improving Spoken Programming Through Language Design and the Incorporation of Dynamic Context

Programming is not just about the syntax of the language; the programming environment is also an important part of the process. In English prose speech recog- nition, knowledge of the context of the conversation or document being produced is useful to disambiguate otherwise error-prone phrases or words. Our spoken programming environment explores the same idea applied to programming by incorporating several forms of context inherent in computer programs to guide and enhance the speech recognition engine: We use the structure and grammar of the language itself, we use scoping of symbols and identifiers, and we incorporate constraints gleaned from type inference. Together, these sources of context allow our programming environment to further improve on the initial performance gain enabled by our new syntax. In this dissertation, we describe the theory and design decisions that went into the aforementioned programming language and its supporting programming environment, as well as the implementation details. We discuss how this setup fits in with—and differs from—previous research in spoken programming. To test the effectiveness of this environment, we conducted a small user study, which is described. The results of this study are presented, together with some qualitative exploration of their implications. Finally, we conclude with some speculation about how the ideas presented here could fit into programming as a whole and suggestions for future research in this direction.

Name thesis:degree_name

Computer Science

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Department of Computer Science

Year

2013

Author dc:creator

• Gordon, Benjamin M

Contributors dc:contributor

• Luger, George F
• Stefanovic, Darko
• Smith, Caroline
• Luan, Shuang

• spoken programming
• programming-by-voice

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cs_etds/28

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalrepository.unm.edu:cs_etds-1027