Kymberly,

>I'm currently studying honours at Monash, and completing a project
>covering various aspects of beginner programming and common mistakes. I
>have been looking for literature on translating medium->high level
>programming languages to natural language, and also on classifying
>semantic errors.

I only know of research in converting natural language to 'lower level'
languages.  However, the following link has some interesting material
that sort of goes the other way:

http://hpcc.grc.nasa.gov/SAM/

>I currently haven't found that much on classifying semantic errors that
>would be more suitable for 'auto-detection' of common beginner mistakes,
>however, many that are helpful for understanding why such errors occur
>and teaching methods that focus on dealing with such errors.  I have
>found a couple of papers that mention debugging environments that can
>highlight possible errors, but didn't detail the methods used, or any
>hints how it was decided that it was an error.

Intention-based diagnostics of Novice Programming Errors by W. Lewis Johnson
ISBN 0-273-08768-1 is worth a read. 

>I have also found some papers specifically dealing with representing
>difficult concepts in a more detailed language representationg (loops
>and some on boolean logic), but not many papers. Many papers I have read
>have been focussed on good language design and most agree that the more
>'natural a language' the easier it is to learn for most students.

My experience of such papers is that they tend to be self serving.  The accepted
view of what constitutes good language design also seems to change dramatically
over the years.


derek

--
Derek M Jones                                           tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd                            mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Applications Standards Conformance Testing   http://www.knosof.co.uk



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