Natural Language Commanding via Program Synthesis
Authors: name: Apurva Gandhi, name: Thong Q. Nguyen, name: Huitian Jiao, name: Robert Steen, name: Ameya Bhatawdekar

We present Semantic Interpreter, a natural language-friendly AI system for
productivity software such as Microsoft Office that leverages large language
models (LLMs) to execute user intent across application features. While LLMs
are excellent at understanding user intent expressed as natural language, they
are not sufficient for fulfilling application-specific user intent that
requires more than text-to-text transformations. We therefore introduce the
Office Domain Specific Language (ODSL), a concise, high-level language
specialized for performing actions in and interacting with entities in Office
applications. Semantic Interpreter leverages an Analysis-Retrieval prompt
construction method with LLMs for program synthesis, translating natural
language user utterances to ODSL programs that can be transpiled to application
APIs and then executed. We focus our discussion primarily on a research
exploration for Microsoft PowerPoint.