The programminglanguages (PL) research community has traditionally catered to the needs of professional programmers in the continuously evolving technical industry. However, there is a new opportunity that knocks our...
详细信息
ISBN:
(纸本)9781450333009
The programminglanguages (PL) research community has traditionally catered to the needs of professional programmers in the continuously evolving technical industry. However, there is a new opportunity that knocks our doors. The recent IT revolution has resulted in the masses having access to personal computing devices. More than 99% of these computer users are non-programmers and are today limited to being passive consumers of the software that is made available to them. Can we empower these users to more effectively leverage computers for their daily tasks? The formalisms, techniques, and tools developed in the PL and the formal methods research communities can play a pivotal role!
Writing formulas on the spreadsheet grid is arguably the most widely practiced form of programming. Still, studies highlight the difficulties experienced by end-user programmers when learning and using traditional for...
详细信息
ISBN:
(纸本)9781450391443
Writing formulas on the spreadsheet grid is arguably the most widely practiced form of programming. Still, studies highlight the difficulties experienced by end-user programmers when learning and using traditional formulas, especially for slightly complex tasks. The purpose of GridBook is to ease these difficulties by supporting formulas expressed in naturallanguage within the grid;it is the first system to do so. GridBook builds on a parser utilizing deep learning to understand analysis intents from the naturallanguage input within a spreadsheet cell. GridBook also leverages the spatial context between cells to infer the analysis parameters underspecified in the naturallanguage input. naturallanguage enables users to analyze data easily and flexibly, to build queries on the results of previous analyses, and to view results intelligibly within the grid-thus taking spreadsheets one step closer to computational notebooks. We evaluated GridBook via two comparative lab studies, with 20 data analysts new only to GridBook. In our studies, there were no significant differences, in terms of time and cognitive load, in participants' data analysis using GridBook and spreadsheets;however, data analysis with GridBook was significantly faster than with computational notebooks. Our study uncovers insights into the application of naturallanguage as a special purpose programminglanguage for end-user programming in spreadsheets.
暂无评论