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DEGraphCS: Embedding Variable-based Flow Graph for Neural Code Search

delete2023-03-30
delete18
PRE
AI
C
Chen Zeng
余月 cover
余月 (Yue Yu)
S
Shanshan Li *
X
Xin Xia
Z
Zhiming Wang
L
Linxiao Bai
W
Wei Dong
X
Xiangke Liao
DOI:10.1145/3546066delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
With the rapid increase of public code repositories, developers maintain a great desire to retrieve precise code snippets by using natural language. Despite existing deep learning-based approaches that provide end-to-end solutions (i.e., accept natural language as queries and show related code fragments), the performance of code search in the large-scale repositories is still low in accuracy because of the code representation (e.g., AST) and modeling (e.g., directly fusing features in the attention stage). In this paper, we propose a novel learnable deep Graph for Code Search (called deGraphCS) to transfer source code into variable-based flow graphs based on an intermediate representation technique, which can model code semantics more precisely than directly processing the code as text or using the syntax tree representation. Furthermore, we propose a graph optimization mechanism to refine the code representation and apply an improved gated graph neural network to model variable-based flow graphs. To evaluate the effectiveness of deGraphCS, we collect a large-scale dataset from GitHub containing 41,152 code snippets written in the C language and reproduce several typical deep code search methods for comparison. The experimental results show that deGraphCS can achieve state-of-the-art performance and accurately retrieve code snippets satisfying the needs of the users.
Keywords:
Intermediate representation
graph neural networks
code search
deep learning

Journal

A
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
IF:
6.2
Papers:
1.2K
Citations:
3.4K

Organization

N
national university of defense technology - china
Scholars:
1.8W
Papers: 1.4W
Citations: 9
Z
zhejiang university
Scholars:
17.5W
Papers: 12.0W
Citations: 152