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Machine reading comprehension with unanswerable questions aims to abstain from answering when no answer can be inferred. In addition to extract answers, previous works usually predict an additional "no-answer" probability to detect…
Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how…
Information retrieval models have witnessed a paradigm shift from unsupervised statistical approaches to feature-based supervised approaches to completely data-driven ones that make use of the pre-training of large language models. While…
It is well-known, and often a topic of heated debates, that programs in some programming languages are more concise than in others. This is a relevant factor when comparing or aggregating volume-impacted metrics on source code written in a…
In Programming by Example, a system attempts to infer a program from input and output examples, generally by searching for a composition of certain base functions. Performing a naive brute force search is infeasible for even mildly involved…
Code readability is fundamental to software quality and maintainability. Poor readability extends development time, increases bug-inducing risks, and contributes to technical debt. With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models, AI…
Decompilation, the process of converting machine-level code into readable source code, plays a critical role in reverse engineering. Given that the main purpose of decompilation is to facilitate code comprehension in scenarios where the…
Readability criteria have been addressed as a measurement of the quality of graph visualizations. In this paper, we argue that readability criteria are necessary but not sufficient. We propose a new kind of criteria, namely faithfulness, to…
Part-prototype networks (e.g., ProtoPNet, ProtoTree, and ProtoPool) have attracted broad research interest for their intrinsic interpretability and comparable accuracy to non-interpretable counterparts. However, recent works find that the…
The visual representation of a pre-trained model prioritizes the classifiability on downstream tasks, while the widespread applications for pre-trained visual models have posed new requirements for representation interpretability. However,…
Program comprehension is a dominant process in software development and maintenance. Experts are considered to comprehend the source code efficiently by directing their gaze, or attention, to important components in it. However, reflecting…
Click-through rate (CTR) is a key signal of relevance for search engine results, both organic and sponsored. CTR of a result has two core components: (a) the probability of examination of a result by a user, and (b) the perceived relevance…
Recent studies suggest that very small language models (SLMs) can generate surprisingly coherent text when trained on simplified, child-directed corpora such as TinyStories. These findings have been interpreted as evidence that readability…
Sketching is an important means of communication in software engineering practice. Yet, there is little research investigating the use of sketches. We want to contribute a better understanding of sketching, in particular its use during…
The high cost of the test can be dramatically reduced, provided that the coverability as an inherent feature of the code under test is predictable. This article offers a machine learning model to predict the extent to which the test could…
Feature attribution methods are popular for explaining neural network predictions, and they are often evaluated on metrics such as comprehensiveness and sufficiency. In this paper, we highlight an intriguing property of these metrics: their…
Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments assist developers in program comprehension and maintenance tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, unclear conventions for writing good comments, and the lack of…
Many tasks aim to measure machine reading comprehension (MRC), often focusing on question types presumed to be difficult. Rarely, however, do task designers start by considering what systems should in fact comprehend. In this paper we make…
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…
In programming education, it makes a difference whether you are dealing with beginners or advanced students. As our future students will become even more tech-savvy, it is necessary to assess programming skills appropriately and quickly to…