Programming Language Support for Natural Language Interaction

Modern conversational user interfaces depend on natural language understanding (NLU) engines, but integrating these capabilities creates a new category of engineering challenges. Developers write verbose, unsafe code to intermediate between NLU services and application logic, and ambiguous parses further complicate handling. We present a DSL for configuring an NLU model that ensures consistency and type safety, and we propose a new language construct to express ambiguity by exploring hypothetical actions.