Related papers: On the Lexical Distinguishability of Source Code

Source Code Summarization is the task of writing short, natural language descriptions of source code. The main use for these descriptions is in software documentation e.g. the one-sentence Java method descriptions in JavaDocs. Code…

Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without…

Real software, the kind working programmers produce by the kLOC to solve real-world problems, tends to be "natural", like speech or natural language; it tends to be highly repetitive and predictable. Researchers have captured this…

Source code comes in different shapes and forms. Previous research has already shown code to be more predictable than natural language as well as highlighted its statistical predictability at the token level: source code can be natural.…

Translation between natural language and source code can help software development by enabling developers to comprehend, ideate, search, and write computer programs in natural language. Despite growing interest from the industry and the…

This project explores the nature of language acquisition in computers, guided by techniques similar to those used in children. While existing natural language processing methods are limited in scope and understanding, our system aims to…

Natural language is compositional; the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of its parts. This property allows humans to create and interpret novel sentences, generalizing robustly outside their prior experience. Neural…

The common use case of code smells assumes causality: Identify a smell, remove it, and by doing so improve the code. We empirically investigate their fitness to this use. We present a list of properties that code smells should have if they…

Natural language processing for programming aims to use NLP techniques to assist programming. It is increasingly prevalent for its effectiveness in improving productivity. Distinct from natural language, a programming language is highly…

Comments are an integral part of software development; they are natural language descriptions associated with source code elements. Understanding explicit associations can be useful in improving code comprehensibility and maintaining the…

Natural languages are complexly structured entities. They exhibit characterising regularities that can be exploited to link them one another. In this work, I compare two morphological aspects of languages: Written Patterns and Sentence…

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving relevant code given a natural language query. While related to other information retrieval tasks, it requires bridging the gap between the language used in code (often abbreviated and highly…

Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of…

We participated in the WMT 2022 Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for the African Languages Shared Task. This work describes our approach, which is based on filtering the given noisy data using a sentence-pair classifier that was…

Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…

Although information theoretic characterizations of human communication have become increasingly popular in linguistics, to date they have largely involved grafting probabilistic constructs onto older ideas about grammar. Similarities…

The context of this work is specification, detection and ultimately removal of detectable harmful patterns in source code that are associated with defects in design and implementation of software. In particular, we investigate five code…

We introduce a new formal model -- based on the mathematical construct of sheaves -- for representing contradictory information in textual sources. This model has the advantage of letting us (a) identify the causes of the inconsistency; (b)…

Code analysis is fundamental in Software Engineering, supporting debugging, optimization, and security assessment. Human developers approach it through syntax parsing, static semantics inference, and dynamic reasoning. Traditional tools are…

Source code summarization is the task of creating short, natural language descriptions of source code. Code summarization is the backbone of much software documentation such as JavaDocs, in which very brief comments such as "adds the…