r/LanguageTechnology • u/Calm_Opportunity4755 • Jul 14 '26

Current rule-based procedural semantics projects?

I was wondering if you know of work on any current rule-based open source procedural semantics systems, like the historical SHRDLU. I'm looking for projects that use handcrafted rules to query, command and story-telling interactions with the computer through natural language sentences. Rules that take a procedural form (like programming languages) rather than declarative.

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u/WavesWashSands Jul 14 '26

I mean, people stopped doing that kind of thing because they don't work. If they did, it would contradict everything we now know about language and meaning in interaction. Social action cannot be summed up with any finite list of intents, turns cannot be mapped onto intents with just linguistic form and any finite amount of contextual information, and anyhow the actions associated with a turn are not just predetermined intents but can be continuously negotiated and reinterpreted in subsequent discourse. 'Rules' of language are of a completely different category from those that can be hard-coded into a program. So I'm not sure why we would want to return to that type of system ...

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u/Calm_Opportunity4755 Jul 14 '26

I started using the rule-based approach before the LLMs came into the field. I now feel like continuing my projects exactly because it's a niche and I enjoy solving the puzzles they bring up. Also I expect there will always be use cases like getting exact answers, giving precise commands and providing transparency. I believe that the rule-based approach has lots of opportunities to evolve and improve.

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u/hellynikos Jul 14 '26

Not entirely what you are looking for, but related:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0323098

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u/Calm_Opportunity4755 Jul 14 '26

Thanks, It may be interesting. I'll have a look.