- {name: "ArXiV", url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.09436"}

- {name: "Code and other info", url: "https://github.com/github/CodeSearchNet"}

- {name: "Leaderboard", url: "https://app.wandb.ai/github/codesearchnet/benchmark"}

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving relevant code given a natural language query. While related to other information retrieval tasks, it requires bridging the gap between the language used in code (often abbreviated and highly technical) and natural language more suitable to describe vague concepts and ideas.

conference: PACMPL

year: 2015

bibkey: luan2019aroma

Programmers often write code that has similarity to existing code written somewhere. A tool that could help programmers to search such similar code would be immensely useful. Such a tool could help programmers to extend partially written code snippets to completely implement necessary functionality, help to discover extensions to the partial code which are commonly included by other programmers, help to cross-check against similar code written by other programmers, or help to add extra code which would fix common mistakes and errors. We propose Aroma, a tool and technique for code recommendation via structural code search. Aroma indexes a huge code corpus including thousands of open-source projects, takes a partial code snippet as input, searches the corpus for method bodies containing the partial code snippet, and clusters and intersects the results of the search to recommend a small set of succinct code snippets which both contain the query snippet and appear as part of several methods in the corpus. We evaluated Aroma on 2000 randomly selected queries created from the corpus, as well as 64 queries derived from code snippets obtained from Stack Overflow, a popular website for discussing code. We implemented Aroma for 4 different languages, and developed an IDE plugin for Aroma. Furthermore, we conducted a study where we asked 12 programmers to complete programming tasks using Aroma, and collected their feedback. Our results indicate that Aroma is capable of retrieving and recommending relevant code snippets efficiently.

bibkey: sun2020pscs

additional_links:

- {name: "ArXiV", url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.03042"}

To obtain code snippets for reuse, programmers prefer to search for related documents, e.g., blogs or Q&A, instead of code itself. The major reason is due to the semantic diversity and mismatch between queries and code snippets. Deep learning models have been proposed to address this challenge. Compared with approaches using information retrieval techniques, deep learning models do not suffer from the information loss caused by refining user intention into keywords. However, the performance of previous works is not satisfactory because they ignore the importance of code structure. When the semantics of code (e.g., identifier names, APIs) are ambiguous, code structure may be the only feature for the model to utilize. In that case, previous works relearn the structural information from lexical tokens of code, which is extremely difficult for a model without any domain knowledge. In this work, we propose PSCS, a path-based neural model for semantic code search. Our model encodes both the semantics and structures of code represented by AST paths. We train and evaluate our model over 330k-19k query-function pairs, respectively. The evaluation results demonstrate that PSCS achieves a SuccessRate of 47.6% and a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 30.4% when considering the top-10 results with a match. The proposed approach significantly outperforms both DeepCS, the first approach that applies deep learning to code search task, and CARLCS, a state-of-the-art approach that introduces a co-attentive representation learning model on the basis of DeepCS. The importance of code structure is demonstrated with an ablation study on code features, which enlightens model design for further studies.

bibkey: wang2020trans

additional_links:

- {name: "ArXiV", url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03238"}

Code summarization and code search have been widely adopted in sofwaredevelopmentandmaintenance. However, fewstudieshave explored the efcacy of unifying them. In this paper, we propose TranS^3 , a transformer-based framework to integrate code summarization with code search. Specifcally, for code summarization,TranS^3 enables an actor-critic network, where in the actor network, we encode the collected code snippets via transformer- and tree-transformer-based encoder and decode the given code snippet to generate its comment. Meanwhile, we iteratively tune the actor network via the feedback from the critic network for enhancing the quality of the generated comments. Furthermore, we import the generated comments to code search for enhancing its accuracy. To evaluatetheefectivenessof TranS^3 , we conduct a set of experimental studies and case studies where the experimental results suggest that TranS^3 can signifcantly outperform multiple state-of-the-art approaches in both code summarization and code search and the study results further strengthen the efcacy of TranS^3 from the developers' points of view.