Program Synthesis and Natural Language Processing: A Systematic Literature Review

Program Synthesis is the process of automatically generating software from a requirement specification. This paper presents a systematic literature review focused on program synthesis from specifications expressed in natural language. The study aims to examine recent works published within the last five years, identifying emerging trends and potential areas for further exploration. Four major data sources (IEEE, ACM, Springer, and Elsevier) were selected to gather a total of eight papers from various journals and conference proceedings. These papers propose solutions that target end-users or inexperienced programmers by leveraging natural language queries as inputs and generating expressions in boolean logic, DSL, or Java. The methods employed for program synthesis range from rule-based approaches that encode explicit translation rules from natural language to code, to more advanced techniques that learn these rules from input-output pairs.