  Dialogue systems is an increasingly popular task of natural language
processing. However, the dialogue paths tend to be deterministic, restricted to
the system rails, regardless of the given request or input text. Recent
advances in program synthesis have led to systems which can synthesize programs
from very general search spaces, e.g. Programming by Example, and to systems
with very accessible interfaces for writing programs, e.g. text-to-code
translation, but have not achieved both of these qualities in the same system.
We propose Modular Programs for Text-guided Hierarchical Synthesis (MPaTHS), a
method for integrating Programming by Example and text-to-code systems which
offers an accessible natural language interface for synthesizing general
programs. We present a program representation that allows our method to be
applied to the problem of task-oriented dialogue. Finally, we demo MPaTHS using
our program representation.
