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Software developers often reuse code from online sources such as Stack Overflow within their projects. However, the process of searching for code snippets and integrating them within existing source code can be tedious. In order to improve…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Brittany Reid , Christoph Treude , Markus Wagner

Code retrieval is a common practice for programmers to reuse existing code snippets in open-source repositories. Given a user query (i.e., a natural language description), code retrieval aims at searching for the most relevant ones from a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Wenchao Gu , Zongjie Li , Cuiyun Gao , Chaozheng Wang , Hongyu Zhang , Zenglin Xu , Michael R. Lyu

Enriched by natural language texts, Stack Overflow code snippets are an invaluable code-centric knowledge base of small units of source code. Besides being useful for software developers, these annotated snippets can potentially serve as…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-08-09 Di Yang , Aftab Hussain , Cristina Lopes

In source code search, a common information-seeking strategy involves providing a short initial query with a broad meaning, and then iteratively refining the query using terms gleaned from the results of subsequent searches. This strategy…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-01-26 Zachary Eberhart , Collin McMillan

The source code of successful projects is evolving all the time, resulting in hundreds of thousands of code changes stored in source code repositories. This wealth of data can be useful, e.g., to find changes similar to a planned code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Luca Di Grazia , Paul Bredl , Michael Pradel

Automatic query reformulation is a widely utilized technology for enriching user requirements and enhancing the outcomes of code search. It can be conceptualized as a machine translation task, wherein the objective is to rephrase a given…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Yuetian Mao , Chengcheng Wan , Yuze Jiang , Xiaodong Gu

Developers often search for relevant code examples on the web for their programming tasks. Unfortunately, they face two major problems. First, the search is impaired due to a lexical gap between their query (task description) and the…

Developers spend a significant amount of time searching for code: e.g., to understand how to complete, correct, or adapt their own code for a new context. Unfortunately, the state of the art in code search has not evolved much beyond text…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-06-12 Vineeth Kashyap , David Bingham Brown , Ben Liblit , David Melski , Thomas Reps

Nowadays, developers often turn to Stack Overflow for solutions to daily problems, however, these code snippets are partial code that cannot be tested and verified properly. One way to test these code snippets is to transform them into APIs…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Yubo Mai , Zhipeng Gao , Xing Hu , Lingfeng Bao , Jingyuan Chen , Jianling Sun

Background: Sub-optimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers may write low-quality code due to many reasons, such as lack of technical knowledge, lack of experience, time pressure, management decisions, and even unhappiness.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Chaiyong Ragkhitwetsagul , Matheus Paixao

Automatic query reformulation refers to rewriting a user's original query in order to improve the ranking of retrieval results compared to the original query. We present a general framework for automatic query reformulation based on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2015-07-15 Fernando Diaz

Code search and comprehension have become more difficult in recent years due to the rapid expansion of available source code. Current tools lack a way to label arbitrary code at scale while maintaining up-to-date representations of new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Ben Gelman , Bryan Hoyle , Jessica Moore , Joshua Saxe , David Slater

Inability of the naive users to formulate appropriate queries is a fundamental problem in web search engines. Therefore, assisting users to issue more effective queries is an important way to improve users' happiness. One effective approach…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Amir H. Jadidinejad

In software engineering-related tasks (such as programming language tag prediction based on code snippets from Stack Overflow), the programming language classification for code snippets is a common task. In this study, we propose a novel…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Guang Yang , Yanlin Zhou , Chi Yu , Xiang Chen

StackOverflow has become an emerging resource for talent recognition in recent years. While users exploit technical language on StackOverflow, recruiters try to find the relevant candidates for jobs using their own terminology. This…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-07-17 Arash Dargahi Nobari , Mahmood Neshati , Sajad Sotudeh Gharebagh

Developers spend a significant amount of time searching their local codebase. To help them search efficiently, researchers have proposed novel tools that apply state-of-the-art information retrieval algorithms to retrieve relevant code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2014-01-28 Xi Ge , David Shepherd , Kostadin Damevski , Emerson Murphy-Hill

Searching code is a common task that developers perform to understand APIs, learn common code patterns, and navigate code. Currently, developers most commonly search using keywords and regular expressions that are easy to use and widely…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Ben Limpanukorn , Yanjun Wang , Zach Patterson , Pranav Garg , Murali Krishna Ramanathan , Xiaofei Ma , Anoop Deoras , Miryung Kim

As code search is a frequent developer activity in software development practices, improving the performance of code search is a critical task. In the text retrieval based search techniques employed in the code search, the term mismatch…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Liming Nie , He Jiang , Zhilei Ren , Zeyi Sun , Xiaochen Li

Retrieval-based code question answering seeks to match user queries in natural language to relevant code snippets. Previous approaches typically rely on pretraining models using crafted bi-modal and uni-modal datasets to align text and code…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Zehan Li , Jianfei Zhang , Chuantao Yin , Yuanxin Ouyang , Wenge Rong

Code search is an important information retrieval application. Benefits of better code search include faster new developer on-boarding, reduced software maintenance, and ease of understanding for large repositories. Despite improvements in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Lucas Roberts , Denisa Roberts