2020

Exploring Software Naturalness through Neural Language Models

Buratti, Luca, Pujar, Saurabh, Bornea, Mihaela et al.

Understand

The Software Naturalness hypothesis argues that programming languages can be understood through the same techniques used in natural language processing.

  • We explore this hypothesis through the use of a pre-trained transformer-based language model to perform code analysis tasks.
  • Present approaches to code analysis depend heavily on features derived from the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) while our transformer-based language models work on raw source code.
  • This work is the first to investigate whether such language models can discover AST features automatically.

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