code2seq: Generating Sequences from Structured Representations of Code

Uri Alon, Shaked Brody, Omer Levy, Eran Yahav

Published: 21 Dec 2018, Last Modified: 14 Oct 2024ICLR 2019 Conference Blind SubmissionReaders: Everyone

Abstract: The ability to generate natural language sequences from source code snippets has a variety of applications such as code summarization, documentation, and retrieval. Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, adopted from neural machine translation (NMT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on these tasks by treating source code as a sequence of tokens. We present code2seq: an alternative approach that leverages the syntactic structure of programming languages to better encode source code. Our model represents a code snippet as the set of compositional paths in its abstract syntax tree (AST) and uses attention to select the relevant paths while decoding. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for two tasks, two programming languages, and four datasets of up to 16M examples. Our model significantly outperforms previous models that were specifically designed for programming languages, as well as general state-of-the-art NMT models. An interactive online demo of our model is available at http://code2seq.org. Our code, data and trained models are available at http://github.com/tech-srl/code2seq.

Keywords: source code, programs, code2seq

TL;DR: We leverage the syntactic structure of source code to generate natural language sequences.

Code: [![github](/images/github_icon.svg) tech-srl/code2seq](https://github.com/tech-srl/code2seq) + [![Papers with Code](/images/pwc_icon.svg) 5 community implementations](https://paperswithcode.com/paper/?openreview=H1gKYo09tX)

Data: [Code2Seq (Java)](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/code2seq)

Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 6 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/code2seq-generating-sequences-from-structured/code)

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