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Structural Language Models of Code (arxiv.org)
2 points by matt_d on Jun 8, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It fills missing code by treating code as a syntax tree and predicting each node from the paths leading to it. It can write any expression, unlike earlier tools that limited what was possible, and beat word-by-word and other tree-based models on Java and C#.

Abstract

We address the problem of any-code completion - generating a missing piece of source code in a given program without any restriction on the vocabulary or structure. We introduce a new approach to any-code completion that leverages the strict syntax of programming languages to model a code snippet as a tree - structural language modeling (SLM). SLM estimates the probability of the program's abstract syntax tree (AST) by decomposing it into a product of conditional probabilities over its nodes. We present a neural model that computes these conditional probabilities by considering all AST paths leading to a target node. Unlike previous techniques that have severely restricted the kinds of expressions that can be generated in this task, our approach can generate arbitrary code in any programming language. Our model significantly outperforms both seq2seq and a variety of structured approaches in generating Java and C# code. Our code, data, and trained models are available at http://github.com/tech-srl/slm-code-generation/ . An online demo is available at http://AnyCodeGen.org .

Uri Alon, Roy Sadaka, Omer Levy, Eran Yahav
arXiv:1910.00577 · cs.LG, cs.PL, stat.ML · submitted Sep 30, 2019 · updated Jul 29, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Appeared in ICML'2020

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Also discussed: Jun 2020 (2 points, 0 comments)