Towards a Natural Language Compiler

Being able to create a natural language compiler has been one of the most sought-after goals to reach since the very beginning of artificial intelligence. Since then; however, it has been an elusive and difficult task to achieve to the extent of being considered almost impossible to perform. In this article, we present a promising path by using a grammar formalism which attempts to model natural language; in principle, by using minimalist grammars as one of the last proposed instances of formalism of this type. The main idea consists in creating a parser based on this type of grammars which could recognize and analyze the text (or input program) written in natural language and use this parser as a front-end of a compiler. Then, for the rest of the compilation process, utilize the usual phases of a classic compiler of a programming language. Moreover, we present a prototype of a natural language compiler whose specific language is that of arithmetic expressions, in order to show with evidence that it is indeed possible to implement it, that is to say, to put the proposed compiler design into practice, showing in this manner that it is actually possible to create a natural language compiler following this promising path.