Deep API Learning
Microsoft Research, Beijing, China
arXiv:1605.08535 [cs.SE], (27 May 2016)
@article{gu2016deep,
title={Deep API Learning},
author={Gu, Xiaodong and Zhang, Hongyu and Zhang, Dongmei and Kim, Sunghun},
year={2016},
month={may},
archivePrefix={"arXiv"},
primaryClass={cs.SE}
}
Developers often wonder how to implement a certain functionality (e.g., how to parse XML files) using APIs. Obtaining an API usage sequence based on an API-related natural language query is very helpful in this regard. Given a query, existing approaches utilize information retrieval models to search for matching API sequences. These approaches treat queries and APIs as bag-of-words (i.e., keyword matching or word-to-word alignment) and lack a deep understanding of the semantics of the query. We propose DeepAPI, a deep learning based approach to generate API usage sequences for a given natural language query. Instead of a bags-of-words assumption, it learns the sequence of words in a query and the sequence of associated APIs. DeepAPI adapts a neural language model named RNN Encoder-Decoder. It encodes a word sequence (user query) into a fixed-length context vector, and generates an API sequence based on the context vector. We also augment the RNN Encoder-Decoder by considering the importance of individual APIs. We empirically evaluate our approach with more than 7 million annotated code snippets collected from GitHub. The results show that our approach generates largely accurate API sequences and outperforms the related approaches.
May 30, 2016 by hgpu
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