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Tens of thousands of engineers use Sourcegraph day-to-day to search for code and rely on it to make progress on software development tasks. We face a key challenge in designing a query language that accommodates the needs of a broad…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Rijnard van Tonder

Context: Recent research indicates that Web queries written by software developers are not very successful in retrieving relevant results, performing measurably worse compared to general purpose Web queries. Most approaches up to this point…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-07-27 Mia Mohammad Imran , Kostadin Damevski

Software engineers need relevant and up-to-date architectural knowledge (AK), in order to make well-founded design decisions. However, finding such AK is quite challenging. One pragmatic approach is to search for AK on the web using…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Mohamed Soliman , Marion Wiese , Yikun Li , Matthias Riebisch , Paris Avgeriou

People have a high level of trust in search engines, especially Google, but only limited knowledge of them, as numerous studies have shown. This leads to the question: To what extent is this trust justified considering the lack of…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Sebastian Schultheiß , Dirk Lewandowski

AlphaCode is a code generation system for assisting software developers in solving competitive programming problems using natural language problem descriptions. Despite the advantages of the code generating system, the open source community…

Code writing is repetitive and predictable, inspiring us to develop various code intelligence techniques. This survey focuses on code search, that is, to retrieve code that matches a given query by effectively capturing the semantic…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Yutao Xie , Jiayi Lin , Hande Dong , Lei Zhang , Zhonghai Wu

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into education, university students preparing for English language tests are frequently shifting between traditional search engines like Google and large language models (LLMs)…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Tarek Rahman , Md Shaharia Hossen , Mark Protik Mondol , Jannatun Noor Mukta

Semantic code search has been widely adopted in both academia and industry. These approaches embed natural-language queries and code snippets into a shared embedding space and retrieve results based on vector similarity. Despit strong…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Yiming Liu , Ruofan Liu , Yun Lin , Zicong Zhang , Weiyu Kong , Pengnian Qi , Xiao Cheng , Weinan Zhang , Qianxiang Wang , Linpeng Huang

Software developers routinely search for code using general-purpose search engines. However, these search engines cannot find code semantically unless it has an accompanying description. We propose a technique for semantic code search: A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Marcelo de Rezende Martins , Marco A. Gerosa

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Hamel Husain , Ho-Hsiang Wu , Tiferet Gazit , Miltiadis Allamanis , Marc Brockschmidt

Typical users are known to use and reuse weak passwords. Yet, as cybersecurity concerns continue to rise, understanding the password practices of software developers becomes increasingly important. In this work, we examine developers'…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Nikolaos Lykousas , Constantinos Patsakis

Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers to seek programming-related information. More and more developers use Community Question and Answer forums, such as Stack Overflow, to search for code examples of how to accomplish…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Zhipeng Gao , Xin Xia , David Lo , John Grundy , Xindong Zhang , Zhenchang Xing

Language models can serve as a valuable tool for software developers to increase productivity. Large generative models can be used for code generation and code completion, while smaller encoder-only models are capable of performing code…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Andor Diera , Abdelhalim Dahou , Lukas Galke , Fabian Karl , Florian Sihler , Ansgar Scherp

Developers use tools such as GitHub pull requests to review code, discuss proposed changes, and request modifications. While changed files are commonly presented in alphabetical order, this does not necessarily coincide with the reviewer's…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Abir Bouraffa , Carolin Brandt , Andy Zaidmann , Walid Maalej

GitHub introduced the suggestion feature to enable reviewers to explicitly suggest code modifications in pull requests. These suggestions make the reviewers' feedback more actionable for the submitters and represent a valuable knowledge for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Abir Bouraffa , Yen Dieu Pham , Walid Maalej

Code search is an important and well-studied task, but it usually means searching for code by a text query. We argue that using a code snippet (and possibly an error traceback) as a query while looking for bugfixing instructions and code…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Ivan Sedykh , Dmitry Abulkhanov , Nikita Sorokin , Sergey Nikolenko , Valentin Malykh

Web search plays an integral role in software engineering (SE) to help with various tasks such as finding documentation, debugging, installation, etc. In this work, we present the first large-scale analysis of web search behavior for SE…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-01 Nikitha Rao , Chetan Bansal , Thomas Zimmermann , Ahmed Hassan Awadallah , Nachiappan Nagappan

Voice search is becoming a popular mode for interacting with search engines. As a result, research has gone into building better voice transcription engines, interfaces, and search engines that better handle inherent verbosity of queries.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2013-12-17 Apoorv Narang , Srikanta Bedathur

Background: Academic search engines (i.e., digital libraries and indexers) play an increasingly important role in systematic reviews however these engines do not seem to effectively support such reviews, e.g., researchers confront usability…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Zheng Li , Austen Rainer

We carried out a retrieval effectiveness test on the three major web search engines (i.e., Google, Microsoft and Yahoo). In addition to relevance judgments, we classified the results according to their commercial intent and whether or not…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2015-11-19 Dirk Lewandowski