English

Ain't Nobody Got Time For Coding: Structure-Aware Program Synthesis From Natural Language

Machine Learning 2019-02-19 v2 Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages Machine Learning

Abstract

Program synthesis from natural language (NL) is practical for humans and, once technically feasible, would significantly facilitate software development and revolutionize end-user programming. We present SAPS, an end-to-end neural network capable of mapping relatively complex, multi-sentence NL specifications to snippets of executable code. The proposed architecture relies exclusively on neural components, and is trained on abstract syntax trees, combined with a pretrained word embedding and a bi-directional multi-layer LSTM for processing of word sequences. The decoder features a doubly-recurrent LSTM, for which we propose novel signal propagation schemes and soft attention mechanism. When applied to a large dataset of problems proposed in a previous study, SAPS performs on par with or better than the method proposed there, producing correct programs in over 92% of cases. In contrast to other methods, it does not require post-processing of the resulting programs, and uses a fixed-dimensional latent representation as the only interface between the NL analyzer and the source code generator.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.09717,
  title  = {Ain't Nobody Got Time For Coding: Structure-Aware Program Synthesis From Natural Language},
  author = {Jakub Bednarek and Karol Piaskowski and Krzysztof Krawiec},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.09717},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:49:29.131Z