Related papers: On the Structure and Semantics of Identifier Names…
Identifiers make up a majority of the text in code. They are one of the most basic mediums through which developers describe the code they create and understand the code that others create. Therefore, understanding the patterns latent in…
Unknowingly, identifiers in the source code of a software system play a vital role in determining the quality of the system. Ambiguous and confusing identifier names lead developers to not only misunderstand the behavior of the code but…
Identifier names, which comprise a significant portion of the codebase, are the cornerstone of effective program comprehension. However, research has shown that poorly chosen names can significantly increase cognitive load and hinder…
Before any software maintenance can occur, developers must read the identifier names found in the code to be maintained. Thus, high-quality identifier names are essential for productive program comprehension and maintenance activities. With…
Identifier names convey useful information about the intended semantics of code. Name-based program analyses use this information, e.g., to detect bugs, to predict types, and to improve the readability of code. At the core of name-based…
The paper presents the Source Code Analysis and Lexical Annotation Runtime (SCALAR), a tool specialized for mapping (annotating) source code identifier names to their corresponding part-of-speech tag sequence (grammar pattern). SCALAR's…
Suppose we want to build a system that answers a natural language question by representing its semantics as a logical form and computing the answer given a structured database of facts. The core part of such a system is the semantic parser…
Design patterns are distilled from many real systems to catalog common programming practice. However, some object-oriented design patterns are distorted or overly complicated because of the lack of supporting programming language constructs…
Program code contains functions, variables, and data structures that are represented by names. To promote human understanding, these names should describe the role and use of the code elements they represent. But the names given by…
Neural code intelligence (CI) models are opaque black-boxes and offer little insight on the features they use in making predictions. This opacity may lead to distrust in their prediction and hamper their wider adoption in safety-critical…
Background: The renaming of program identifiers is the most common refactoring operation. Because some identifiers are related to each other, developers may need to rename related identifiers together. Aims: To understand how developers…
This thesis develops the translation between category theory and computational linguistics as a foundation for natural language processing. The three chapters deal with syntax, semantics and pragmatics. First, string diagrams provide a…
A program is characterized by its input model, and a formal input model can be of use in diverse areas including vulnerability analysis, reverse engineering, fuzzing and software testing, clone detection and refactoring. Unfortunately,…
The way developers collaborate inside and particularly across teams often escapes management's attention, despite a formal organization with designated teams being defined. Observability of the actual, organically formed engineering…
Pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive performance in both natural language processing and program understanding, which represent the input as a token sequence without explicitly modeling its structure. Some prior works…
Study patterns that models have learned has long been a focus of pattern recognition research. Explaining what patterns are discovered from training data, and how patterns are generalized to unseen data are instrumental to understanding and…
Discovering pattern sets or global patterns is an attractive issue from the pattern mining community in order to provide useful information. By combining local patterns satisfying a joint meaning, this approach produces patterns of higher…
Many of the existing approaches for program comprehension rely on the linguistic information found in source code, such as identifier names and comments. Semantic clustering is one such technique for modularization of the system that relies…
Names are essential to both human cognition and vision-language models. Open-vocabulary models utilize class names as text prompts to generalize to categories unseen during training. However, the precision of these names is often overlooked…
Research scientists increasingly rely on implementing software to support their research. While previous research has examined the impact of identifier names on program comprehension in traditional programming environments, limited work has…