CodeGRU: Context-aware deep learning with gated recurrent unit for source code modeling

doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106309

CodeGRU: Context-aware deep learning with gated recurrent unit for source code modeling

2020-09-01

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DOI：10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106309

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Context: Recently deep learning based Natural Language Processing (NLP) models have shown great potential in the modeling of source code. However, a major limitation of these approaches is that they take source code as simple tokens of text and ignore its contextual, syntactical and structural dependencies. Objective: In this work, we present CodeGRU, a gated recurrent unit based source code language model that is capable of capturing source code's contextual, syntactical and structural dependencies. Method: We introduce a novel approach which can capture the source code context by leveraging the source code token types. Further, we adopt a novel approach which can learn variable size context by taking into account source code's syntax, and structural information. Results: We evaluate CodeGRU with real-world data set and it shows that CodeGRU outperforms the state-of-the-art language models and help reduce the vocabulary size up to 24.93%. Unlike previous works, we tested CodeGRU with an independent test set which suggests that our methodology does not requisite the source code comes from the same domain as training data while providing suggestions. We further evaluate CodeGRU with two software engineering applications: source code suggestion, and source code completion. Conclusion: Our experiment confirms that the source code's contextual information can be vital and can help improve the software language models. The extensive evaluation of CodeGRU shows that it outperforms the state-of-the-art models. The results further suggest that the proposed approach can help reduce the vocabulary size and is of practical use for software developers.

Keywords:

Machine learning

Deep learning

Software language models

Source code suggestion

Source code completion

CodeGRU: Context-aware deep learning with gated recurrent unit for source code modeling

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