Towards semantic approaches for general-purpose end-user development

Despite the demand for increasing automation within specified tasks by a large spectrum of different users, software development is still a complex task mainly oriented to professional programmers. Often, the exploration and understanding of large code bases is also a difficult task for experienced developers. Recently, semantic parsers and advances in research areas primarily investigated within the field of natural language human-robot interaction, have shown to be potentially useful for end-user development supported by natural language communication. Hence, this paper provides a structured review and categorization of approaches to ease software development, both for professional software programmers and for end-users with no prior programming skills. We then focus on semantic developments based on natural language understanding and on a comparison between the outlined approaches.