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Advances in natural language processing have resulted in large language models (LLMs) that are capable of generating understandable and sensible written text. Recent versions of these models, such as OpenAI Codex and GPT-3, can generate…

Developers frequently reuse Stack Overflow code snippets, yet the quality of these snippets remains unevenly understood, particularly across programming languages and geographic contexts. This study investigates code quality in Stack…

LLMs have shown immense potential for code translation, yet they often struggle to ensure both syntactic correctness and semantic consistency. While preference-based learning offers a promising alignment strategy, it is hindered by…

In the past years, software reverse engineering dealt with source code understanding. Nowadays, it is levered to software requirements abstract level, supported by feature model notations, language independent, and simpler than the source…

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…

Program representation learning is a fundamental task in software engineering applications. With the availability of "big code" and the development of deep learning techniques, various program representation learning models have been…

On the Stack Overflow (SO) Q&A site, users often request solutions to their code-related problems (e.g., errors, unexpected behavior). Unfortunately, they often miss required code snippets during their question submission, which could…

Developers often resort to online Q&A forums such as Stack Overflow (SO) for filling their programming needs. Although code examples on those forums are good starting points, they are often incomplete and inadequate for developers' local…

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…

Programmers currently enjoy access to a very high number of code repositories and libraries of ever increasing size. The ensuing potential for reuse is however hampered by the fact that searching within all this code becomes an increasingly…

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…

Program synthesis is a class of regression problems where one seeks a solution, in the form of a source-code program, mapping the inputs to their corresponding outputs exactly. Due to its precise and combinatorial nature, program synthesis…

Code Review plays a crucial role in software quality, by allowing reviewers to discuss and critique any new patches before they can be successfully integrated into the project code. Yet, it is unsure the extent to which coding pattern…

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.…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

Natural code is known to be very repetitive (much more so than natural language corpora); furthermore, this repetitiveness persists, even after accounting for the simpler syntax of code. However, programming languages are very expressive,…

Code completion is widely used by software developers to provide coding suggestions given a partially written code snippet. Apart from the traditional code completion methods, which only support single token completion at minimal positions,…

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices, which might hinder comprehension, increase code complexity and fault-proneness and decrease maintainability of software systems. The aim of our study was to perform a…

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been…

Customization is a general trend in software engineering, demanding systems that support variable stakeholder requirements. Two opposing strategies are commonly used to create variants: software clone & own and software configuration with…