ScratchTalk and social computation: towards a natural language scripting model

Natural Language interfaces have been proposed as a solution to make application functionality more accessible to end users. Practical implementation of such systems has been hampered by both semantic and knowledge-engineering challenges. This paper introduces Social Computation, a theoretical model targeting both challenges. The model employs natural language in a planning framework to enable communities of end-users to collaborate, explicitly and implicitly, in the development of new functionality. The model intrinsically supports the acquisition of user goals and natural language semantics in the context of the application domain. ScratchTalk is a prototype of the natural language planning component of the model applied to the Scratch programming environment. This serves to ground the framework and provide insights into the space of applications likely to be addressable by the Social Computation model.