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

TL;DR

This paper introduces NL2Bash, a new dataset and semantic parsing approach to translate natural English instructions into Bash commands, aiming to simplify Linux operations for users.

Contribution

It provides a novel dataset of Bash commands with English descriptions and baseline parsing methods, advancing research in natural language interfaces for Linux.

Findings

New dataset of Bash commands and descriptions

Baseline parsing methods established for NL2Bash

Performance benchmarks for future research

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 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 new dataset of challenging but commonly used Bash commands and expert-written English descriptions, along with baseline methods to establish performance levels on this task.