In plain words: Users describe what they want in plain language, and a neural network writes the code one character at a time, instead of a person typing it by hand. A case study shows this can work, though better training data and network designs are needed.
Abstract · On End-to-End Program Generation from User Intention by Deep Neural Networks
This paper envisions an end-to-end program generation scenario using recurrent neural networks (RNNs): Users can express their intention in natural language; an RNN then automatically generates corresponding code in a characterby-by-character fashion. We demonstrate its feasibility through a case study and empirical analysis. To fully make such technique useful in practice, we also point out several cross-disciplinary challenges, including modeling user intention, providing datasets, improving model architectures, etc. Although much long-term research shall be addressed in this new field, we believe end-to-end program generation would become a reality in future decades, and we are looking forward to its practice.
Lili Mou, Rui Men, Ge Li, Lu Zhang, Zhi Jin
arXiv:1510.07211 · cs.SE, cs.LG · submitted Oct 25, 2015
abstract · pdf · html · Submitted to 2016 International Conference of Software Engineering "Vision of 2025 and Beyond" track