Semantic Code Search in Software Repositories using Neural Machine Translation

Abstract

Nowadays, software development is accelerated through the reuse of code snippets found online in question-answering platforms and software repositories. In order to be efficient, this process requires forming an appropriate query and identifying the most suitable code snippet, which can sometimes be challenging and particularly time-consuming. Over the last years, several code recommendation systems have been developed to offer a solution to this problem. Nevertheless, most of them recommend API calls or sequences instead of reusable code snippets. Furthermore, they do not employ architectures advanced enough to exploit the semantics of natural language and code in order to form the optimal query from the question posed. To overcome these issues, we propose CodeTransformer, a code recommendation system that provides useful, reusable code snippets extracted from open-source GitHub repositories. By employing a neural network architecture that comprises advanced attention mechanisms, our system effectively understands and models natural language queries and code snippets in a joint vector space. Upon evaluating CodeTransformer quantitatively against a similar system and qualitatively using a dataset from Stack Overflow, we conclude that our approach can recommend useful and reusable snippets to developers.