Natural mapping between voice commands and APIs

Abstract After a voice control system transforms audio input into a natural language sentence, its main purpose is to map this sentence to a specific action in the API (application programming interface) that should be performed. This mapping is usually specified after the API is already designed. In this paper, we show how an API can be designed with voice control in mind, which makes this mapping natural. The classes, methods, and parameters in the source code are named and typed according to the terms expected in the natural language commands. When this is insufficient, annotations (attribute-oriented programming) are used to define synonyms, string-to-object maps, or other properties. We also describe the mapping process and present a preliminary implementation called VCMapper. In its evaluation on a third-party dataset, it was successfully used to map all the sentences, while a large portion of the mapping was performed using only naming and typing conventions.